Parallax

Althrough Cunard lived the life of a wealthy young socialite, travelling and mingling with the literary elite, the 1920s also saw her working seriously at establishing herself as a poet. Parallax was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1925; the poem powerfully capturing the pessimism of the modernist sensibility. It centres on the wanderings of a young male poet through London, Paris, and Italy as he contemplates love, friendship, and art.

The harsh critical reception of her work indicated some of the struggles faced by women poets in establishing themselves in the male-dominated high Modernist literary sphere. Her style was considered romantic and old-fashioned by the arch-Modernist Ezra Pound. Meanwhile, T.S. Eliot mocked her poetic aspirations in an excised section of the Waste Land. For her part, Cunard admired Eliot’s work, and Parallax is indebted to the Waste Land. The poet Samuel Beckett was a great admirer of the poem and Cunard’s friend, Irene Rathbone, described it as “young and bitter and life-loving and crazy and joyous and sad".