[The "Love Songs"] are haunting not only for their exploration of sexual dissonance but because they are drenched in the atmosphere of World War I. They are a peculiar kind of war poetry. Their range of attitudes--the tonal shifts from hopefulness and anticipation through wariness and suspicion to vexation and bitterness--may all be understood as those of the outsider, the nonparticipant, the woman whose life is put on hold yet deeply affected by the collapse of civilization around her. Similarly, what now seem like hallmarks of modernist style--the ironic swerves, the impossibility of resolution, the emphasis on shards, fragments, and flickers of meaning, the distortion of time and the closing off of the future--are all historically based, in a period when Italy temporized and Europe fought its "machine war." . . . Contemporary readers of "Love Songs" were disturbed by this hovering preoccupation. . . . Progressives and nonconformists were troubled by the poems' eccentricities, but without doubt, what upset readers most was their diagnosis of sexual love as yet another casualty of war. (208)