There is no Life or Death, Only activity And in the absolute Is no declivity. There is no Love or Lust Only propensity Who would possess Is a nonentity. There is no First or Last Only equality And who would rule Joins the majority. There is no Space or Time Only intensity, And tame things Have no immensity.
Where this text comes from
First published in Camera Work, no. 46 (dated April 1914), p. 18. Not read on the page. The Modernist Journals Project’s record of the issue lists its contents item by item and gives “‘There is no Life or Death’ (Loy, Mina): 18-18”, which is also the title this record carries — the piece is headed by its first line in quotation marks. Standard Ebooks names a HathiTrust scan of the same issue as its source. The issue is dated April 1914 on its cover; the number itself was late, and its contents include a notice of the 1914-1915 season at “291”. [1] [2]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/mina-loy_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (15)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L16.
Cite this poem
Mina Loy (1882–1966).
“There Is No Life or Death.” First published in Camera Work, no. 46 (dated April 1914), p. 18.
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/mina-loy/there-is-no-life-or-death/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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