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<\/a><\/p>\n\n\u201cWords were her plague and words were her redemption.\u201d — H.D. HERmione<\/i><\/big><\/p>\n
It’s H.D.’s birthday today. <\/p>\n
First up: I wrote a gigantic piece about H.D.’s film criticism<\/a> for Film Comment<\/i>. Turns out, it was the final piece I wrote for Film Comment<\/i> before it closed its doors in the pandemic. At any rate: I worked my ass off on that piece, and am very proud of it!<\/p>\n \n \nMy research for that one piece:<\/p>\n \n \nEventually, I was like, “Sheila. You have got to start actually writing. The piece won’t write itself.” <\/p>\n Considering her name was Hilda Doolittle<\/em>, it’s still a slight shock to remember she was born in Pennsylvania and not, say, Liverpool. Christened “H.D.” by Ezra Pound (her first boyfriend, and briefly her fiance), she was at the center of the Imagist movement in poetry. Pound saw her as the ultimate fulfillment of the poetic ideas he had been espousing. <\/p>\n Like the rest of the Imagists, H.D. was interested in direct and simple expression. It was the Imagists’ way of rebelling against Victorian curlycues and lengthy descriptions. Pare it down, and then pare it down MORE. H.D.’s early poems look almost like fragments (reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s poems). H.D.’s idol was Sappho – not just for the obvious reason. Saphho’s passionate responsiveness to … everything … spoke deeply to H.D. H.D.’s overriding desire in her work was to be overwhelmed<\/i> (this explains her interest in mysticism later on). She wanted the poem to act as an agent<\/i>, something that would not only transport her, but obliterate<\/em> her. H.D. seeked transcendence, a prolonged state of exaltation not easy to sustain. This was also what interested her about film. <\/p>\n Here’s “Helen”, written in 1924.<\/p>\n \nHelen<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n All Greece hates All Greece reviles Greece sees, unmoved, \n H.D., from Tribute to Freud<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n But the Professor insisted I myself wanted to be Moses; not only did I want to be a boy but I wanted to be a hero.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Often, the poet appears in the role of a priest who has come to worship and celebrate a natural event. She prays that the event–the sea, the heat of the day, any item of real or imagined life–will overwhelm her. Through the ritual of her verse, she seeks an ecstatic loss of self, not unlike the lyric ecstasies of her treasured classical poet, Sappho. Invoking flowers in “Sea Rose,” “Garden,” and “Sea Violet,” H.D. describes a complex emotional state that mingles toughness and vulnerability, much like the androgynous poems she is fashioning–tender but strong, buffeted but enduring, responsive but hard, “cut in rock.” Though ostensibly about nature, these poems rethink traditional polarities of gender.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ezra Pound, The Imagists, rules:<\/strong><\/p>\n Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether objective or subjective; to use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation: as regarding rhythm, to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Like Ezra Pound, her close friend and colleague, H.D. seems to me essentially an American Pre-Raphaelite poet, a naming that I intend as a compliment since I deeply love the poetry of the Rossettis, Morris, Meredith, and Swinburne. Even as Pound assimilates Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Walt Whitman, so H.D. compounds Christina Rossetti with Emily Dickinson, and both together with the male sequence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Pound, and D.H. Lawrence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ezra Pound on H.D. <\/strong><\/p>\n Objective – no slither; direct – no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight to the Greek!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n R.P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n H.D.’s special form of the mode of Imagism–cold, “Greek,” fast, and enclosed–has become one of the ordinary resources of the poetic language. It is a regular means of putting down words so that they will keep.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Camille Paglia, “Love Poetry”:<\/strong><\/p>\n Love poetry of the twentieth century is the most varied and sexually explicit since classical antiquity…Amy Lowell vividly charts the works and days of a settled, sustaining lesbian relationship, while H.D. projects lesbian feeling into Greek personae, often male.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Perdita Schaffner, on her mother: <\/strong><\/p>\n Her descents into everyday life were an ordeal. She over-reacted. The least disruption set off total frenzy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n H.D. had arrived in London in 1911, and her verse, written under the spell of ancient Greek lyrical fragments, so impressed Pound that a year later he sent her poems, signed “H.D. Imagiste” at his insistence, to Harriet Monroe, the founding editor of Poetry<\/i>, the Chicago clearinghouse for modern verse. He told Monroe that H.D.’s poems were “modern” and “laconic,” though classical in subject…H.D.’s early poems — lucid, economical, often centered in a single metaphor — best exemplified [the Imagist] theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n The only woman in the first wave of major Anglo-American modernists, her work is different in kind from the others’, even in its earliest and purest Imagist forms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Robert Lowell on H.D.’s vision of WWI: <\/strong><\/p>\n Bombs falling on the British Museum.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n What seems clear is that her sexual self-acceptance, whether Freudian or not, gave her the creative serenity that made possible the wonderfully controlled, hushed resignation of her wisely limited farewell to D.H. Lawrence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision<\/em>, 1919:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Madonna of the Rocks<\/em> is not a picture. It is a window.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Amy Lowell, on first reading H.D.’s poems in a 1913 issue of Poetry<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n “Why, I too am an Imagiste<\/em>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Side note: Ezra Pound, the founder of Imagism, was so irritated by what Amy Lowell did under its moniker, he referred to it as “Amygism” and founded another poetry movement, Vorticism, to distance himself.) <\/p>\n The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n H.D. tried to discover how few words are required to make a poem, in revolt against the comparative excess and sentimentality of Victorian verse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n H.D., Asphodel<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI mean seeing the Elgin marbles this morning gave me the same feeling and I didn\u2019t know, don\u2019t know whether I\u2019m in Rome or Paris. I mean the Louvre and the British Museum hold one together, keep one from going to bits.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michael Schmidt: <\/strong><\/p>\n She was the Imagist touchstone, an example of how poetry could be reclaimed from the excesses of the Georgians, where language generally seemed (to Pound) to exceed its occasion, and where the occasions themselves were merely conventional. In H.D. Pound found a concentration, an absence of sentiment, and accuracy of rhythm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n H.D., quoted in Glenn Hughes’ Imagism and the Imagists<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Ezra Pound was very kind and used to bring me (literally) armfuls of books to read …I did a few poems that I don’t think Ezra liked …but later he was beautiful about my first authentic verses … and sent my poems in for me to Miss Monroe [the editor of Poetry<\/i> magazine]. He signed them for me, ‘H.D., Imagiste.’ The name seems to have stuck somehow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Though the Imagist movement formally came to an end in 1917, when [Amy] Lowell published the third of her anthologies, both Pound and H.D. went on to write long, complex, many-layered poems that recall Imagism in their musical cadences, sharp juxtapositions, and free-ranging content.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n William Carlos Williams, Autobiography<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n [She was] wild… angular … [with] a provocative indifference to rule and order.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n H.D. often returns to such traditional female archetypes as the rose, the lily, Helen of Troy, Leda, and the Virgin Mary. Her engagements with this traditional iconography are revisionary. Her rose is not an idealized symbol of the feminine other, but natural and time bound. Although her poem “Helen” recalls earlier depictions of this paradigmatic beauty as the bleached-out object of idolatry, H.D. interrogates this idealization, suggesting that it culminates in hatred, death, and destructiveness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n H.D. on psychoanalysis:<\/strong><\/p>\n I wanted to dig down and dig out, root out my personal needs, strengthen my purposes, reaffirm my beliefs, canalize my energies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n H.D., HERmione<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n She did not know that all her life would be spent gambling with the stark rigidity of words, words that were coin; save, spend; and all the time George Lowndes with his own counter, had found her a way out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Finally: <\/p>\n Here’s a really nice post by my old friend Ted<\/a> about H.D. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWords were her plague and words were her redemption.\u201d — H.D. HERmione It’s H.D.’s birthday today. First up: I wrote a gigantic piece about H.D.’s film criticism for Film Comment. Turns out, it was the final piece I wrote for … Continue reading <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nthe still eyes in the white face,
\nthe lustre as of olives
\nwhere she stands,
\nand the white hands.<\/p>\n
\nthe wan face when she smiles,
\nhating it deeper still
\nwhen it grows wan and white,
\nremembering past enchantments
\nand past ills.<\/p>\n
\nGod’s daughter, born of love,
\nthe beauty of cool feet
\nand slenderest knees,
\ncould love indeed the maid,
\nonly if she were laid,
\nwhite ash amid funereal cypresses.<\/p>\nQUOTES:<\/strong><\/h2>\n