Author Description

First published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1920, this work is public domain in the US. Paris is a long poem by Hope Mirrlees, described as "modernism's lost masterpiece" by critic Julia Briggs. Mirrlees wrote the six-hundred-line poem in spring 1919. Only 175 copies of the first edition were distributed. In 2011, the poem was reprinted in an edition of Mirrlees's Collected Poems which helped create more critical interest. The poem is a psychogeography of post-World War I Paris. The speaker goes on a day-long stroll, beginning in a Metro tunnel, before emerging onto the streets and visiting sites such as gardens and museums. References to advertisements, works of art, literature, and music, as well as conversation fragments, are interspersed throughout.