In 1925, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published a slim volume of poetry by Nancy Cunard, featuring an eye-catching Surrealist cover designed by her friend Eugene McCown. Parallax, which celebrates its centenary this year, is mainly remembered today for its association with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which Hogarth had published three years earlier. Contemporary critics largely dismissed the book-length poem as a mere “imitation” of Eliot’s seminal work, contending that it embraced a deliberate “parallelism” in its style and thematic preoccupations. Yet Parallax is infinitely more complex and deserves renewed consideration as an innovative modernist long poem in its own right. As University of Kent professor David Ayers has argued, “Cunard has created a new rhetorical form, over which she has suspended the name ‘parallax,’ in which a systematic reworking and re-presentation of the existing material of a contemporary is used to create a new work.” The title Parallax refers to the displacement or difference in the position of a distant object when viewed from two different angles, perhaps inspired by Leopold Bloom’s musings on the term in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): “Parallax… Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing.” Although Cunard’s initial critics may have disregarded her apparent imitation of Eliot’s style as a “waste of time,” we can now reconsider the poem as a convergence of different styles and voices, a multiplicity of references “crossing each other.” Like the meaning of its title, the original consensus on Parallax’s significance has now proven to be distorted. Imitating the skewed angles of the buildings on the book’s cover, what we initially appear to perceive in fact bends surrealistically away from view.

To her early readers, Cunard might have seemed an unlikely person to produce such an experimental text. The daughter of a British baronet, the heir to the Cunard shipping fortune, and an American heiress, she was born in 1896 in London to a privileged upper-class existence. At the age of twenty-four she moved to Paris, where she became involved with the Surrealist and Dadaist movements and published several collections of poetry. In 1928, she established the Hours Press in Normandy with the goal of supporting the development of experimental poetry and providing a higher-paying market for young writers. She published early works by Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, and Laura Riding, produced a series of pamphlets on war poetry featuring authors such as W. H. Auden and Pablo Neruda, and edited an anthology of African American writing. She dedicated the operation of her press and her personal writing to the anti-fascist cause throughout the 1930s, working as a translator on behalf of the French Resistance during World War II. For Cunard, supporting the development of controversial and experimental literature was a powerful form of leftist political resistance. Her own writing was a rebellion not only against the conventions of form but the expectations of how a wealthy British socialite was expected to live.

Parallax’s 27 stanzas and 637 lines merge disconnected impressions of disparate speakers and places, navigating across a series of European cities including London, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Florence over the course of several months. An extended meditation on time, love, and language, it experiments with form by employing broken and disjointed lineation. Like Cunard’s overarching body of work—such as the choice of name for her press, a possible homage to The Hours, Woolf’s original working title for Mrs. Dalloway—Parallax encircles the passage of time. Early in the poem, Cunard writes:

Here Cunard compresses different measures of time, transitioning between the indefinite lengths of “Midnight, aurora, daytime” and discrete units such as months and hours. Mathematical units of time are thus subsumed within the eternal cycles of the natural world: the ebb and flow of the tide, sunrise and sunset, and seasonal change. The broken lineation of the word “hour,” which closes the stanza, calls attention to the breaking down of temporality into smaller and smaller units. In a subsequent stanza, she merges distinct impressions of time and place, observing “Torpidly / Afternoon settles on the town / each hour long as a street…”

This shifting conception of temporality illuminates Parallax’s overarching project: what does it mean to write a long poem that is intended to be interpreted as a singular narrative but is composed of separate stanzas, discrete units which function like the hours in a day? Indeed, it is surprising that Cunard settled on 27 stanzas rather than 24 to evoke the passage of time. The poem therefore not only possesses a historical consciousness but orients itself toward an unfurling future. Like The Waste Land, its depiction of postwar London’s urban decay feels distinctly modernist as well as eerily contemporary:

Cunard’s narrator finds herself drifting around the city, borne aloft on a tide of modernity’s detritus. She moves “Through the stale hot dust— / And up across the murk to Fitzroy Square,” forever conscious of the layers of history beneath her feet: “Dry bones turfed over by reiterant seasons, / Dry graves filled in, stifled, built upon with new / customs.” At times, the poem’s style explicitly mimics Eliot. Cunard’s “siren voices lost at dawn” and “resumed love songs” evoke The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, while the passage “Hail partner, that went as I / In towns, in wastes—I, shadow, / Meet with you—I that have walked with recording eyes” is reminiscent of the famous lines from The Waste Land: “Your shadow at morning striding behind you. / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” Yet Parallax is more than a conscious imitation of The Waste Land; it is a complex response to and reworking of it. Just as Cunard imagines cities “Rising on the inexpressible meaning of their streets,” rebirthed from the ashes of history, she incorporates Eliot’s style and imagery into a few of the many polyphonous voices in Parallax, transforming it into a new work. In doing so, she suggests literature’s power to endure beyond the limits of the human lifespan. “In Aix, what’s remembered of Cézanne?” the speaker asks, a question that is answered by an old waiter who responds “Of course I knew him, he was a dull silent fellow, / Dead now.” The artist’s genius is recognized worldwide but not in his provincial city; instead, his reputation is subsumed into a wider narrative of the development of modern art. His story will join a patchwork of other voices and other lives: “The years are sewn together with thread of the same / story.”

The most notable formal element of Parallax is its unusual lineation, which features the occasional offsetting of the last word of a stanza to create emphasis. Cunard plays with form in lines such as “the treacherous / hour / Breaking,” in which “hour” is disconnected from the remainder of the previous line and “Breaking” forms the start of a new stanza. The disparate stanzas are thus connected to each other, flowing into one cohesive narrative. Although not as formally experimental as other modernist long poems, Parallax’s ruptured and disjointed enjambment was enabled by Woolf’s close editorial collaboration with her authors and practice of painstakingly hand-setting her type. Hogarth’s limited print runs and dedication to formal experimentation allowed its authors to take greater risks, an editorial practice Cunard adopted for her own press. The typography of Parallax also resembles an earlier, little-known long poem published by Hogarth, Hope Mirrlees’s Paris (1920). Like Parallax, Paris employs an impressionistic series of disconnected images and speakers to evoke the disorienting nature of modern urban life, but the form is far bolder and more jarring, mimicking the concrete shapes of street signs, plaques, and tombstones and imitating the stem of a flower. Paris has been suggested as a possible influence on The Waste Land, but could it have also been a source of inspiration for Parallax? Both poems combine a variety of different voices into one cohesive narrative project voiced by a singular speaker. In expanding upon Eliot’s form, Parallax deserves reappraisal as a bold intervention rather than an imitation, one that orients itself toward the future of poetry. Looking back at Parallax, we might catch glimpses of the long poem today: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, and Renee Gladman’s Juice all stand as testaments to the form’s endurance.