Moods

First published in 1919, Moods is Mercedes de Acosta's first of three books of poetry that appeared in quick succession in the early 1920s. Consciously written as prose vignettes, Moods confounded its publisher and compositor, as well as critics, who were utterly unfamiliar with unlineated poetry. As an adolescent, Mercedes's sister Rita took her to Paris where she received an informal cultural education from French artists, and undoubtedly gained exposure to French writers as well and their proclivity to petits poèmes en prose. An early precursor stateside was Stuart Merrill's volume of translations of French prose poems, Pastels in Prose, which was published in 1890. Moods was definitely an oddity in its time, but its structure and language were solidly traditional as opposed to the contemporaneous Kora in Hell: Improvisations by William Carlos Williams. While Acosta's significance mainly lies in LGBTQ+ history, this slim volume marks a waysign in the development of the American prose poem, creating more open considerations of the history of the genre and poetry itself.This edition of Moods contains a short introduction by Charles Hanson Towne and a critical afterword by Kathryn Good-Schiff.