"What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) developed into an expansive and unique quest for a poetics that would fuel Duncan's great work into the 1960s and 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the writings of H.D., Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and many others, Duncan's wide-ranging work is especially notable for illuminating the role women played in creating literary modernism"--From publisher description.
"Your lights are but dank shoals; slate and pebbles and wet shells; and sea weed fastened to the rocks." The book 'Sea Garden' is a collection of poems mainly themed on the sea and its natural scenery, as well as its perils to the sea faring. Some of the poem titles include: "She watches over the sea", "Mid-day", "Pursuit", "The Contest" and "Sea Lily."
In The American H.D., Annette Debo considers the significance of nation in the artistic vision and life of the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle. Her versatile career stretching from 1906 to 1961, H.D. was a major American writer who spent her adult life abroad; a poet and translator who also wrote experimental novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and a children’s book; a white writer with ties to the Harlem Renaissance; an intellectual who collaborated on avant-garde films and film criticism; and an upper-middle-class woman who refused to follow gender conventions. Her wide-ranging career thus embodies an expansive narrative about the relationship of modernism to the United States and the nuances of the American nation from the Gilded Age to the Cold War. Making extensive use of material in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale—including correspondences, unpublished autobiographical writings, family papers, photographs, and Professor Norman Holmes Pearson’s notes for a planned biography of H.D.—Debo’s American H.D. reveals details about its subject never before published. Adroitly weaving together literary criticism, biography, and cultural history, The American H.D. tells a new story about the significance of this important writer. Written with clarity and sincere affection for its subject, The American H.D. brings together a sophisticated understanding of modernism, the poetry and prose of H.D., the personalities of her era, and the historical and cultural context in which they developed: America’s emergence as a dominant economic and political power that was riven by racial and social inequities at home.
Ezra Pound’s definition of an epic as “a poem containing history” raises questions: how can a poem “contain” history? And if it can, does it help us to think about history in ways that conventional historiography cannot? Poems Containing History: Twentieth-Century American Poetry’s Engagement with the Past, by Gary Grieve-Carlson, argues that twentieth-century American poetry has “contained” and helped its readers to think about history in a variety of provocative and powerful ways. Tracing the discussion of the relationship between poetry and history from Aristotle’s Poetics to Norman Mailer’s The Armiesof the Night and Hayden White’s Metahistory, the book shows that even as history evolves into a professional, academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, and as its practitioners emphasize the scientific aspects of their work and minimize its literary aspects, twentieth-century American poets continue to take history as the subject of their major poems. Sometimes they endorse the views of mainstream historians, as Stephen Vincent Benét does in John Brown’s Body, but more often they challenge them, as do Robert Penn Warren in Brother to Dragons, Ezra Pound in TheCantos, or Charles Olson in TheMaximus Poems. In Conquistador, Archibald MacLeish illustrates Aristotle’s claim that poetry tells more philosophical truths about the past than history does, while in Paterson, William Carlos Williams develops a Nietzschean suspicion of history’s value. Three major American poets—T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, Hart Crane in TheBridge, and Carolyn Forché in The Angel of History—present different challenges to professional historiography’s assumption that the past is best understood in strictly material terms. Poems Containing History devotes chapters to each of these poets and offers a clear sense of the seriousness with which American poetry has engaged the past, as well as the great variety of those engagements.
Figures of Time proposes radically new ideas about the very poetic ground of culture. Presenting unique close readings of six modern poets—Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and T. S. Eliot—David Ben-Merre brings recent theoretical questions about the rhetoric of modernism and poetic figuration into current discussions in critical theory. He argues that poetic spaces, often disjunctions of sound and sense, disrupt our culturally inherited notions of time, reimagining with an often irrational and anachronistic backward glance what we take to be historical chronologies, psychological perceptions of time, and collective scripts about causality.
H. D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines concerns a prominent aspect of the writing of the modern American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle): a lifelong engagement with hellenic literature, mythology and art. H. D.'s hellenic intertextuality is examined in the context of classical fictions operative at the turn of the century: the war of words among literary critics establishing a new 'classicism' in reaction to romanticism; the fictions of classical transmission and the problem of women within the classical line; nineteenth-century romantic hellenism, represented in the writing of Walter Pater; and the renewed interest in ancient religion brought about by anthropological studies, represented in the writing of Jane Ellen Harrison. Eileen Gregory explores at length H. D.'s intertextual engagement with specific classical writers: Sappho, Theocritus and the Greek Anthology, Homer and Euripides. The concluding chapter sketches chronologically H. D.'s career-long study and reinvention of Euripidean texts. An appendix catalogues classical subtexts in Collected Poems, 1912-1944, edited by Louis Martz.
“H. D's wit, sense of rhythm, and control of language prove the inadequacy of the imagist label that is so often applied to this writer.” —Library Journal This autobiographical novel, an interior self-portrait of the poet H. D. (1886-1961) is what can best be described as a "find,' a posthumous treasure. In writing HERmione, H.D. returned to a year in her life that was "peculiarly blighted." She was in her early twenties––"a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place… Waves to fight against, to fight against alone…'I am Hermione Gart, a failure’––she cried in her dementia, 'l am Her, Her, Her."' She had failed at Bryn Mawr, she felt hemmed in by her family, she did not yet know what she was going to do with her life. The return from Europe of the wild-haired George Lowndes (Ezra Pound) expanded her horizons but threatened her sense of self. An intense new friendship with Fayne Rabb (Frances Josepha Gregg), an odd girl who was, if not lesbian, then certainly of bisexual bent, brought an atmosphere that made her hold on everyday reality more tenuous. This stormy course led to mental breakdown, then to a turning point and a new beginning as her own true self, as "Her”––the poet H.D. Perdita Schaffner, H.D.'s daughter, who can remember back to the time in 1927 when her mother was barricaded with her typewriter behind a locked door, working on this very novel, has provided a charming and telling introduction.
This book recognizes that modernist poetry can be both difficult and rewarding to teach. Leading scholars and poets from the UK and the US offer practical, innovative, up to date strategies for teaching the reading and writing of modernist poetry across its long diverse histories, taking in experimentation, performance, hypertext and much more.
