Starry Sky

The aim of this chapter is to ‘showcase’ two stellar (in more than one sense) modernist texts which met with relish the challenge presented by the pace of technological and literary change, and which remain to this day essentially uncategorizable: Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ (1914) and Mina Loy’s ‘Songs to Joannes’ (1915). These texts put a cosmological understanding of the universe as medium in dialectical tension with the generation of exclusive closed circuits and loops (an exclusiveness that might be thought to amount to madness). Lewis and Loy aimed not simply to represent, but to reproduce, the idea of communication as an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The chapter concludes with a discussion of cryptographic modernism, and of the poems of Harriet Monroe.