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Paris: A Poem is a long poem by Hope Mirrlees, described as "modernism's lost masterpiece" by critic Julia Briggs.[1] Mirrlees wrote the six-hundred-line poem in spring 1919. Although the title page of the first edition mistakenly has the year 1919, it was first published in 1920 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Only 175 copies of the first edition were distributed.[2] In 2011, the poem was reprinted in an edition of Mirrlees's Collected Poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar, which helped create more critical interest.[3]
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. Parts of the poem imitate the appearance of the thing being described, such as posters and plaques. While the poem is primarily written in English, many of the lines use French and a couple of words are in Greek. Mirrlees never wrote anything similar in style after Paris.