Introduction to the Original Text

Jane Marcus outlines her methodology and focus on Nancy Cunard as a poet, contextualizing Cunard’s involvement in the poetry scene with canonical figures of modernism, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Stephen Spender, and pointing to the ways in which she rejected the dominant aesthetic of her age. She also explores Cunard’s concern with whiteness through the influence of father figures, George Moore and Norman Douglas, from her childhood and young adulthood. Cunard’s engagement with Black culture, the compilation of the Negro Anthology, and her journalism devoted to anti-fascism and leftist political activism as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War and for the African American Associated Press are also considered here.