Maxwell Bodenheim belonged to the first wave of American modernist poets who, in the early twentieth century, traded strict meter for a more compressed, image-driven free verse. He was part of the Chicago literary scene around Harriet Monroe’s *Poetry* magazine, and his 1918 collection *Minna and Myself* shows how modernism’s urge to “make it new” could also turn inward. The twenty-first poem in the Minna sequence, “Minna XXI,” is a six-line portrait that unfolds like the object it describes.
The poem presents a layered idea of a person. The opening line, “Your body is a closed fan,” is deceptively simple: it turns Minna’s physical presence into an object of stillness and potential. Inside that fan are “long brush-strokes of glowing repose,” as if her body were a painted surface holding light and calm. The phrase “glowing repose” is a small paradox, because glowing suggests energy while repose suggests stillness, so the body seems to store brightness in a quiet, folded form. But then words arrive: “Your words clumsily unloosen the fan.” Speech does not reveal her smoothly; it fumbles. What the opened fan releases is not simple meaning but “the rustling birth of forgotten doubts,” a whisper of unease that had been hidden in the folds. By the final lines, the speaker shifts from body and words to the soul, which “bears the fan lightly in his hand / And waves to the mirror his blind eyes cannot touch.” The soul holds identity delicately, but it cannot see its own reflection. The central insight is that human beings are not a single transparent self; they are a body that composes, words that fumble, and a soul that reaches toward a reflection it will never fully grasp.
Bodenheim’s construction is deliberately unrhymed and loose in rhythm, but it has a careful sensory arc. The first two lines feel painterly and still, weighted with long vowels and the soft *s* sounds of “closed” and “brush-strokes.” The word “clumsily” jolts that smoothness, as if speech stumbles against the body’s composure. The word “unloosen” is itself awkward and double-suffixed, almost too much, which makes the act of opening feel effortful. The poem then moves from sight to sound to motion: the fan dips, doubts are born, the soul waves. “Rustling birth” mixes hearing with becoming, so that doubt seems alive and newly awakened rather than abstract. The mirror is the final, crucial image: a mirror usually promises self-knowledge, but here the soul’s eyes are blind and “cannot touch” it. That phrase mixes sight and touch to suggest that even the deepest part of a person cannot make contact with its own image.
The significance of “Minna XXI” lies in how much it compresses into six lines. It belongs to a moment when poets were stripping away narrative and moralizing to capture fleeting states of consciousness. Bodenheim uses the fan as both visual object and metaphor: closed, it is a surface of beauty; opened, it exposes hidden motion; held by the soul, it becomes a gesture of longing for self-knowledge. The poem matters because it honestly frames identity as layered and partly inaccessible. For school readers, its six lines are a reminder that a person’s calm exterior may be a painted fan, and that words can awkwardly release what the body had kept folded. The final image of a blind soul waving to a mirror is not a defeat; it is a recognition that self-understanding is an ongoing, imperfect gesture.