Collected Poems, 1912-1944

by H.D., Louis L. Martz (Editor)

Of special significance are the "Uncollected and Unpublished Poems (1912-1944)," the third section of the book, written mainly in the 1930s, during H. D.'s supposed "fallow" period. As these pages reveal, she was in fact writing a great deal of important poetry at the time, although publishing only a small part of it. The later, wartime poems in this section form an essential prologue to her magnificent Trilogy (1944), the fourth and culminating part of this book. Born in Pennsylvania in 1886, Hilda Doolittle moved to London in 1911 in the footsteps of her friend and one-time fiancé Ezra Pound. Indeed it was Pound, acting as the London scout for Poetry magazine, who helped her begin her extraordinary career, penning the words "H. D., Imagiste" to a group of six poems and sending them on to editor Harriet Monroe in Chicago. The Collected Poems 1912-1944 traces the continual expansion of H. D.'s work from her early imagistic mode to the prophetic style of her "hidden" years in the 1930s, climaxing in the broader, mature accomplishment of Trilogy. The book is edited by Professor Louis L. Martz of Yale, who supplies valuable textual notes and an introductory essay that relates the significance of H. D.'s life to her equally remarkable literary achievement.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Literature, The United States Of America, 20th Century, LGBT, Womens

672 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

An innovative modernist American writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. H.D., most well known for her lyric and epic poetry, also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember my first semester at Temple when Rachel made us make a sound map of "red roses for bronze" so that we could see the sexy hidden poem inside. H.D. encoded her internal self in basic sounds in many of these poems. the attention to sound emerges in forests. small snapping branches under the waving breath of trees. the tension between her and nature, between her and her ungendered other is very personal territory that she turns into a completely new landscape that a reader occupies. not by emotional relation, but by actual hiking in the dense thrush that is the texture of someone's mind projected in thickened words.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I walked through the library during finals week, bored and re-looking for the misplaced version of my favorite copy of "The Complete Works of T.S. Eliot" I said to myself, "Andee, you can't find this copy because you can't keep reading Eliot over and over; read something else."

I browsed through the library's scant collection of postmodern poetry. I looked over some poems written in German. I eyed the contemporary section at a distance. Skimmed through the e.e. cummings collections. I even sat on the floor and marveled at the images of Dante's Divine Comedy that I've been meaning to re-read.

Finally, I found a collection that held my interest; the pages cracked as I turned them, no one had even bothered to open this book before. I noticed the first collection of poems was written in 1916 and titled "Sea Garden". Having an obscure obsession with the ocean, flower gardens, and early-1900s poetry, I knew I had to read this.

And upon reading it I was quite impressed. I give her only four stars however because although Sea Garden was brilliant, the rest was rather unmoving. (If you're into ancient Greek Mythology, however, you might get more out of it than I did.)

Since Ezra Pound read and edited her poems, I would assume she was part of the Imagist movement. (I have not done much biographical research on Doolittle. It really wasn't necessary to understand her poetry anyway.)

I will insert a teaser poem here, one that I believe sums up all her other poetry: beautiful, minimalistic, and metaphoric.

"Oread" (1915)
Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us—
Cover us with your pools of fir.

Bravo, Hilda.

[Annette Boehm · Rating 4 out of 5]

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was an important figure in Modernism, one of the first Imagists, friends with Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, and D.H. Lawrence, and in this collection -- though it contains by no means all of her writing -- you can sense the influence and synergy from all of these interactions.
I'm giving it 4 out of 5 stars because I personally am not a big fan of poetry that relies heavily on the reader's knowledge of classical / Greek drama, and a good part of the poems in this collection heavily reference that stuff. However, the other poetry really drew me in. The book traces H.D.'s development as a writer over the course of 30+ years, a period in time that encompasses both World Wars and had a major impact on her.
For a more in-depth discussion and sample bits and pieces, you can visit my blog: http://outsideofacat.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/you-are-even-a-world-a-planet-h-d-s-collected-poems-1912-44/

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had only recognized H.D. vaguely as a member of the Pound circle, until I'd heard a vintage recording of her reading one of her poems--about Helen and Achilles meeting in the afterlife-- on a Caedman tape with five other women poets. Had to RUN out and buy this. Beautiful, amazing poems mostly couched in the mythology of the Greeks--echoes in Anne Carson, who I also love, but these are short lined and precise, both fragile and passionate.

[J. Alfred · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think that most of the anthologies in which I've seen HD have been fixated on her relation to the broader twentieth century story in her "imagiste" role, and have thus included such things as "Pear Tree" and "Oread," neither of which are anywhere close to her best work.
Reading her Collected Poems, having not had much prior acquaintance, was a 600-odd page pleasant surprise for me. If you can imagine someone who focuses on the 'thingness' of the world like Robinson Jeffers but without the melodrama, while at the same time being a good deal more classical than the early Pound but without the goofiness, you might have an idea of her style. What you wouldn't have would be her sort of impassioned calm, her constant generative allusiveness, her non-facile concern with our well being.
HD will very much repay study. She's also totally unantholigizable, so you better find her in one of her single-author books. Look up "The Mysteries" for a good example of her longer poems.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sea Garden = <3. Just read "The God" series to write a paper. She might be a genius. Will work my way through Trilogy another time.

[Aya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading HD or reading so much HD in a series of days the classical imagery is really what sticks with you. But also I enjoyed how effectively she used repetitions and a kind of fearless approach to length that I think more recent poets don't always have. reading HD is kind of like reading a lot of Sappho or Sappho poem fanfiction ... Partially because if the brief heartbreak and partially because of the Greek references and also probably because I am in the middle of reading the Anne Carson translations of Sappho. I don't mean HD is unoriginal I don't think anyone who reads Trilogy could think that. Reading her work however is a certain experience and if I were to make one complaint about the text: more notes would have been helpful. If I hadn't just come from reading Ovid and homer I probably would have wanted to look some names up. Trilogy which I was really really looking forward to reading ends up being a completely different poem than anyone could have prepared me for. A kind of dream essay that takes the fall of Troy and the burning of London and the birth of Christ and the character of Mary Magdalene and ends up with a poem. That is such a brief summary of events. I don't know what to say. Almost I am not really done with these poems.

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5 stars.) When she's good, she's very good -- Ms. Doolittle has absorbed Greek lyric poetry (especially Sappho and the Greek Anthology) so thoroughly that it's often hard to tell where her translations end and her own writings begin, and many of her poems rival the best Greek lyric tradition.

But she writes in precisely one register/style -- abstract mythological language with bits of histrionic love poetry -- for perhaps 90% of her poems, and the thousandth poem about violet flowers and laurel-shoots set on a plinth at the luminous temple of Zeus, etc. etc., doesn't have quite the impact of the first. Even the Greek lyric poets had more range than this, frankly.

Trilogy at least expands beyond the palette of ancient Greek mythology but unfortunately just ends up in a hermetic and somewhat tedious rehashing of Egyptian/Gnostic mythology. Her uncollected poems (on pp. 307-504 of this edition) occasionally branch out into other styles -- "R.A.F." is amazing, for example -- but one wishes she had done this far earlier and more often.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favorite poet...

[Mikaela Renz-Whitmore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eurydice is my favorite!

[Greg Converse · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you can write exclusively in Ancient Greek imagery and be considered Modern, you have something there.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poet!

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sea Garden; The God; Translations; Hymen; Heliodora

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Louis L. Martz meticulously put together this exhaustive collection of H. D.´s published and unpublished poetry written between 1912 and 1944, along with a very interesting and rewarding 27 page introduction. The first part of the book consists of published books of verse in chronological order; the second part of the book consists of her unpublished poetry and of the poetry she published in magazines but never collected in book form, in chronological order, as far as Martz could reconstruct such an order; the third part of the book consists of a trilogy of long poems originally published separately in booklet form. As Martz himself takes pains to point out in his preface he does not include H. D.´s verse drama (Hippolytus Temporizes, 1927), her translation of Ion or poems “...scattered through her prose works [...] since these poems are best read in their prose context.”

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) was one of the co-founders of Imagism and her first book of verse, Sea Garden (1916) contains some of the finest examples of imagist poems written by any poet, as well as several poems which vividly and imaginatively recreated the world of ancient Greek seafarers. My review of this first book of verse can be found in https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

In The God(1917) and Hymen (1921) she continued to develop her characteristic and strikingly innovative perspectives for many mythical Ancient and Classical Greek figures ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), this focus is carried over into Heliodora and other poems (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) in which her "Greek mask", as D. H. Lawrence rather critically called it, is no longer a conduit to inspiration but an obstacle. The poems become longer, but although a few shorter poems still sparkle and a a few verses in the longer poems still glow, their Greek setting becomes increasingly laboured and stale. By this time roughy a third of the book is over and the reader has reached Red Roses For Bronze (1931). In my case, I was feeling saturated and just had to jump ahead to see whether she managed to paint herself out of her Greek corner. I confess I fast-forwarded over most of Red Roses for Bronze without glimpsing anything that caught my interest. After this book, comes the long section on unpublished and uncollected poetry from a period considered by many critics to be H. D.´s “fallow” period. By dint of uncovering all the poetry H. D. wrote during this period, Martz convincingly shows that she never stopped writing poetry, but, in my opinion, she had reached a dead end. Fortunately she underwent analysis with no lesser a figure than Sigmund Freud and produced a handful of longish poems (The Magician, The Dancer, The Master, The Poet) that bear all the hallmarks of cathartic works thrown up by the subconscious under psychoanalysis. In general this is not great poetry but, following Martz´s suggestions, I found them impossible to resist as thinly veiled autobiographical material, which provided her, under Freud´s direction, with key insights into what was impeding her further development. Of these poems, I found the last two the most interesting. The Master (1933), a tribute to Freud, starts off like a textbook case:

He was very beautiful,
the old man,
and knew wisdom, I found measureless truth
in his words,
his command was final;

leading, little by little up to key insights about herself and her worth:

I was angry at the old man,
I wanted an answer[..]
when I argued and said, “well tell me[..]
he said,
“you are a poet”;
[...]
I was angry with the old man
with his talk of man-strength,
I was angry with his mysteries, his mysteries,
[...]
I could not accept from wisdom
what love taught
woman is perfect
[...]
And it was he himself, he who set me free
to prophesy

In The Poet (1935) she comes to a startling realization about how she differed, as a poet and a person, from her estranged friend D. H. Lawrence, when she compared him, of all things, to a snail and herself to a butterfly:

there was a singing snail,
(does a snail sing?)
a sort of tenous wail
[...]
I believe that I have failed,
because I got out of the husk that was my husk,

and was butterfly

O snail,
I know that you are singing;
your husk is a skull,
your song is an echo,
your song is as infinite as the sea,
your song is nothing,
your song is the high-tide that washed away the old boat-keel
[...]
you are true
to your self, being true
to the irony
of your shell.

III.
Yes,
it is dangerous to get out,
and you shall not fail;
but it is also
dangerous to stay in,
unless one is a snail:

A butterfly has antennae,
is moral
and ironical too.

IV.
And your shell is a temple,
I see it at night-fall;
your small coptic temple
is left inland,
in spite of wind,
not yet buried
in sand-storm

One can only wish, Sylvia Plath had had a comparable epiphany about her relationship with Ted Hughes, for example. H. D. finally broken free of her “Greek mask”, only to find herself, at 54, living through the Battle of Britain. Her diction and her imagery are utterly changed -the Greek distance is gone as is the buzz of constant allusions. There remain only a few occasional, light, surefooted references, such as her references to weaving threads of life and crossing the Styx in R.A.F. (1941) in which her persona encounters a stammering RAF pilot on a train after the Battle of Britain.

his flying-helmet,
and his cumbersome trappings

were unfamiliar
like a deep-sea diver
[....]
I remembered

how I had thought
this field, that meadow

is branded for eternity
(whatever becomes of our earth)

with the mark
of the new cross,

the flying shadow
of high wings,

moving
over the grass.
[...]

XI
He could not know my thoughts,
but between us,

the shuttle sped,
passed back,

the invisible web,
bound us;

whatever we thought or said,
we were people who had crossed over,

we had already crashed,
we were already dead.

XII
If I dare recall
his last swift grave smile,

I award myself
some inch of ribbon

for valour,
such as he wore,

for I am stricken
as never before,

by the thought
of ineptitude, sloth, evil

that prosper,
while such as he fall.

Mark also the first delicate transitions to the world of Christianity, with its “new cross/the flying shadow”.In May 1943, she despairs of of the terrible levelling power of war, as she compares people to rats in gutters:

we´ve grown alike, slithering,
slipping along with fish baskets,
grey faces, fish-faces, frog gait,
we slop, we hop,
we´re off to the bread queue,
the meat-shop, the grocery

before she brings to bear her own myth-making powers to turn, Goldie, a woman ambulance driver found dead at the wheel of her vehicle, into a pyrotechnic display of uplifting and converging mythical figures.

A trilogy of long poems The Walls do not Fall, Tribute to the Angels, The Flowering of the Rod (1944) close the collection. In The Walls do not Fall, the ancient Egytian ruins of Karnak and the modern blitzed out ruins of Londons are tellingly juxtaposed:

there, as here, ruin opens
the tomb, the temple; enter,
there, as here, there are no doors:

the shrine lies open to the sky,
the rain fall, here, there
sand drifts; eternity endures:

ruins everywhere, yet as the fallen roof
leaves the sealed room
open to the air
[...]
to another cellar, to another sliced wall
where poor utensils show
like rare objects in a museum

the fundamental ambivalence of gods is underlined

...but gods always face two-ways

as is man´s illusion of advance

and anyhow,
we have not crawled so very far

In one of her finest long poems, The Flowering of the Rod which is the last poem included in this collection, H. D. is in full syncretic flow as she boldly reinvents Mary Magdalene, weaving her life into that of a stranger in the market place -or is it an old lover- from whom she obtains myrrh to annoint Christ´s feet with, a stranger who could be an Arab or a Chaldean or a reflection of Abraham himself, but who is really the Magian Gaspar or Kaspar. The poem is rich in allusion and fusion and suggestive mythopoeia.

In her thirty two year journey from memorable stark images to prophesy and her own, sometimes dense myth-weaving, H. D.´s work reminds me of William Blake´s thirty one year journey from Songs of Innocence (1789) and his later startling and inminentely memorable The Tyger and The Sick Rose to the final hermetic but intense personal “prophetics books” like Milton and Jerusalem. Other near contemporaries of H. D. seem to have undergone comparable evolutions to her´s -take the lesser English poet, novelist and critic Robert Graves´ (1895-1985) journey from his 1918 The Caterpillar

When I’m old, tired, melancholy,
I’ll build a leaf-green mausoleum
Close by, here on this lovely spray,
And die and dream the ages away.

through fictional retellings of classical history to his unconventional novel King Jesus (1946) and his curious hermeneutic The White Goddess (1948). Take T. S. Eliot´s almost parallel evolution from the profane, secular world of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock (1915) to his final complex, mystical Four Quartets (1945). In Blake, H. D. and Eliot, we see poets grappling with disturbing, violent times and turning from uncommon acuity of eye to a profound, trascendent and intensely personal comprehension of the role and meanings of myth.

To wrap it all up, judged from the standpoint of the effort Martz put into including all of H. D.´s poetry written between 1912 and 1944, the collection deserves no less than four stars. The poetry included is very uneven and ranges all the way from one (and a half?) stars to five stars, so if you are looking for the best of H. D.´s poetry, there is plenty to skip, and it is in this sense that, after much internal debate, I somehow found it more convincing to stamp the book with only three stars.

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

H.D., born Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, PA, is a tough poet to track down. Under H? D? Doolittle? I learned about her in Francesca Wade's excellent group bio of women between the wars who lived in Mecklenburg Square. Now I've spent months reading her poems, a few each day. This collected edition ends with a Christmas tale, so I wish I'd read a bit faster. I'm not sure how much I've retained, but I've felt mesmerized and enthralled nonetheless as I've soaked in these poems and their Greek myth influences, as well as her grief at failed male relations, and her fragments of Sappho as she partnered with a woman. She was a contemporary of Extra Pound and D.H. Lawrence (I wonder when she took on H D and if it was in reaction to his initials.) She was analyzed by Freud who helped her work through a creative block. This chonky volume attests to a continual toil as a poet.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of my favorite poetry I've ever read, with more stunning lines and jaw-dropping imagery per poem and a commingling of Greek and Egyptian etc. mythology and occult themes with imagery and ideas of her own era that feels less pretentious or put-upon than can sometimes be the case with Eliot or Pound. The early Imagist stuff is great, but the overlooked work of the 30s and the epic book-length work Trilogy are the real draw here, for me.

[Ida De Boodt · Rating 4 out of 5]

universeel en persoonlijk
complex en helder
krachtig en rustig
:")

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

H.D.'s early work is precisely the sort of poetry I detested before I fell in love with poetry. Her style is highly syncretic, combining pagan and christian theology, all the while expecting the reader to know all her references. This can be extremely annoying if you are impatient with poetry, and who isn't! I don't blame you if you are! Why hasn't anyone made a reading guide for her work! I bet someone has but I'm too lazy! I'm glad in our poetry class we were regularly required to pick two poems and make our own study guides, using the OED, Encyclopedia Britannica, etc.; the answers are all out there for who these obscure names refer to, and doing the legwork ourselves helped us realize just how vast her knowledge was. Also quite interesting was how sometimes the background knowledge was irrelevant, sometimes it just added a new valence to the poems, and other times, such with Pygmalion, the entire myth is subverted. Below are a couple of my summaries:

Pygmalion

Pygmalion was a king-sculptor who, according to Greek mythology, fell in love with an ivory statue of a woman which he made; in the story, he prayed to Venus and the statue was brought to life and became his wife (Encyclopedia Britannica). By contrast, this poem doesn’t capture the excitement and infatuation leading up to the animation of Pygmalion’s creation, but rather seems to be a departure from and subversion of the myth, ending in a repudiation of Pygmalion’s ambitions by the very gods which he called upon. Traditionally, the story seems to have been interpreted in a positive light as praising the possibilities of artistic creation (and a humanistic striving toward art-as-religion), but this poem challenges that notion and possibly even alludes to the loss of artistic ability, rather than the culmination/divinization of it.


Orion Dead

Taking place in the immediate aftermath of Orion the Hunter’s death, this poem thrives off of anger, the second in the five stages of grief. Told from Artemis’ perspective, it emphasizes hints at but does not tell us definitively which of the several ways Orion mythologically died. Encyclopedia Britannica offers several: “some legends have him killed by Artemis for trying to rape her, others of Apollo’s jealousy over Artemis’ love of Orion; still other legends have him killed by a monstrous scorpion.” Because of the lack of scorpion imagery, the Apollo death seems most likely; Wikipedia helpfully elaborates upon that death: “Apollo, being jealous of Orion's love for Artemis, arranged for Artemis to kill him. Seeing Orion swimming in the ocean, a long way off, he remarked that Artemis could not possibly hit that black thing in the water. Feeling challenged, she sent an arrow right through it and killed Orion; when his body washed up on shore, she wept copiously, and decided to place Orion among the stars.” Depending on which death one interprets this as, it adds different valences of grief and anger to the poem.


In addition to mythology, H.D.'s poetry is also replete with fauna, especially trees and flowers, of which I'm embarrased that I don't know more of them. Once again, sometimes they merely added color to the text (literally and metaphorically, via their sounds of visual aspects), and other times they signified death or other things being discussed in the poems. H.D.'s poetry begins extremely greek, then transforms into something extremely minimalist, often with single-word lines, and with even more frequent repetition. Apparently H.D. was considered an imagist, and she had to wrestle with that and eventually broke free from Ezra Pound and his fascist grasp. Not to say she was some saint politically, she was actually rather uninvolved on the grand scheme of things, even though she lived through both world wars (and wrote poetry during and about them).

Especially, at least to me, important is the poetry triad of hers named "Trilogy," which is a masterwork of poetry. Essentially, she attempts to justify to herself (and her haters) the usefulness of writing poetry when the world feels like it's ending around you. Critics who have commented on Trilogy I personally think have done an atrocious job, so much so that I ripped on a couple of them in my close readings, which I'll include below:

Close Reading 4: “Trilogy”

Detloff’s reading of H.D.’s Trilogy “problematizes” what Detloff wants to see, rather than what H.D. wrote. Symptomatic of a lax usage of psychoanalysis (where it merely finds itself, per Derrida’s classic complaint concerning Lacan), Detloff imposes a singular interpretation upon Trilogy, then turns around and claims that the poem is problematic because it is that interpretation. Essentially, Detloff’s complaint lies instead with H.D.’s synthesis of religion, art, and medicine (cf. Barnstone xii-xiii), rather than following Freud in prioritizing a seculo-medical approach. Detloff rather is the problematic one, oversimplifying all metaphysically-grounded hope as “the ideology of death,” a conspiracy to justify state power and other status quos (80-85).

Central to Detloff’s misunderstanding is her assumption that H.D. somehow uses Biblical references in straightforward, orthodox, or otherwise mainstream ways (“It is therefore troubling that H.D. uses the language of the Book of Revelation - with its emphasis on Christian righteousness and avenging judgment” 87). As Barnstone makes clear, H.D. uses Biblical tropes similarly to ancient Greek mythology and Freudian ideas, namely as raw material for her neo-theology. Too many heterodox theological recontextualizations pervade Trilogy for such complaints of “problematization” to stand; examples include “Thoth, / the original Ancient-of-days” (537), “take what the old-church / found in Mithra’s tomb” (547), “she brings the Book of Life, obviously” (569), etc.

Additionally, Detloff fails to distinguish between the popular understanding of apocalyptic as “the end of the world” and the original, etymologically-sound meaning (uncovering, revealing). Detloff writes on page 88 that, “Apocalyptic writing, too, is ultimately a production for the survivors of cataclysm,” and later on the same page troublingly claims that the only “healthy” mourning is a secular, (metaphysically) hope-less mourning. Detloff says, “Freud argues that the logic of transcendence is fueled by disavowal, the transvaluation of death’s literal meaning as the end of life. That transvaluation impoverishes life by ‘reducing the life which is ended by death to a mere preparation’ for the supposedly better life to come” (88). Such claims are a double-edged sword, and can be made equally in the opposite direction; surely transcendence can cause sloth and complacency in “this life,” but it can also embolden to an extent not possible if “this life” is the only life, and thus must be preserved at all (cowardly) costs. H.D. seems to be encouraging in this way, rather than inspiring cowardice or complacency. Furthermore, H.D. displays nowhere in her poem this supposed “impoverishment,” but rather offers an updating of Europe’s shared religious and scientific lineage via creative and generative combinations.

Much of Detloff’s article is taken up by psychoanalytic pattern-recognition which tells us less about H.D.’s work and more about the confidence Detloff has in her psychoanalytic paradigms. Detloff’s conclusion feels Nietzschean in that she assumes a priori that death cannot be meaningful, lest we give in to the life-denying slave-morality of Christianity. This argument operates from the luxurious position of never having lived through a World War (and needing to process the resultant trauma), so I’d contest that H.D.’s approach competently balances both the problem of the failure of our inherited institutions (civil and religious) and the promise of their salvageable inheritance, choosing to cautiously construct from the rubble rather than abandoning the past wholesale.


Close Reading 5: An Apocryphal Apocalypse

I seem to be most hung up on the first third of Trilogy, especially its palimpsestic relationship both to the later two thirds and to its Biblical allusions. The infamous line “over us, Apocryphal fire” I think deserves the close attention given to it, but I believe how readers interpret it tells us a lot more about the reader than the poem. Barnstone is of the opinion that the wrong word was used, but this seems to merely perpetuate a very superficial reading of the “The Walls” and Trilogy as a whole, namely that it is little more than an apocalyptic (i.e. end-of-the-world) text. Though the etymological difference between “apocalypse” and “apocrypha” is slight, their literary implications are completely contradictory. Those who want to merely prove a point gravitate to an “apocalyptic” reading of the poem as something to dissect, “to uncover” (to prove their interpretation, e.g. Detloff); this contrasts with the “apocryphal” approach, a humbler reception of secrets “from the hidden [source], the crypt[ic].” Coincidentally, this latter approach evokes resurrection imagery, which does feature prominently in Trilogy while the words “apocalypse” and “revelation” are missing from the poem entirely.

If one accepts what is written and continues reading, you may notice the primary conflict within “The Walls” is not the obvious historical context, but rather how we ought to react to said historical context. H.D. divides up the two main responses into the “poetic” and the “utilitarian,” and her intensity seems to peak in the eighth canto, rather than in the introductory one. This canto serves as “key” to the heavy pronoun usage in the poem, with the first person (singular and plural) being on the side of the “word,” and the second and third being those of the “sword.”

I would argue that those who fixate on the “apocalyptic” themes of the poem miss the much more important “apocryphal” uncertainty of the poem. The poem shifts from a confident (“obviously” is used several times) seeking for “the” truth (511, 537) into a gradual resignation to, then comfort with, the apocryphal (ambiguous) nature of language (542-543). Like her writing of Trilogy as a whole, one cannot understand the poem in a straightforwardly linear fashion, but like with any important modernist text, one must jump back and forth, catching repeated references later in the poem and linking it back to earlier usages. It just so happens that the “over us, Apocryphal fire” line is a perfect example of this. On the first readthrough it may smell apocalyptic, but later usages of “fire,” such as on page 521, imply that poets are “companions / of the flame,” which transforms the image of fire from a fearful into a generative one, evoking allusions of Pentecost. It is also important to note that the very places which contain searches for exclusive truth are intertwined with [apocryphal] addendums to her scripture references, such as page 537: “lead us back to the one-truth; // be ye wise / [as asps, scorpions], as serpents” (my brackets added).

With this in mind, we may return to the intensity of Canto eight and its surrounding Cantos, which, despite their confidence, betray a chink in the armor of the seemingly invincible poets-as-creators. Specifically, Canto eleven (519), though claiming primacy over the “sword” also implicates itself in the very creation of said sword (something none of the articles we read seemed to notice). Thus it seems that H.D. cleverly embeds doubt into the most confident moments of her poem, as well as hope in the most doubtful. What you get out of the poem depends on whether you take an “apocalyptic” or “apocryphal” posture toward it.


Apparently my professor actually knows Detloff, which makes me feel slightly worse about ripping her a new asshole, but I think she'll be fine. I personally find it unforgivable to be so sloppy about theology and so partisan about psychoanalysis; this only reinforces my claim that people who don't understand Christian theology are missing out on literally countless references, allusions, associations, valences, etc. whenever they read the great works of literature (especially someone as historically-minded as H.D.). Not to brag, but I notice that my own poetry is at times excessively allusive back to the Christian tradition, and I'm not convinced you can appreciate half my poetry if you don't have those contexts. The other important piece missing from Detloff et al. is intellectual humility, and approaching texts as if they know something you don't. All too often, "intellectuals" love to approach books, especially older, whiter, maler ones, as if they are just children, naive productions by half-formed humans. This supreme arrogance gives said critics the false confidence to project their own BS interpretations onto texts instead of taking the texts at face value and learning from them. H.D., because she attempted to reconstruct from the rubble of WWII (rather than starting afresh like the dead end of postmodern art), and I think her poetry is a triumph as a result. Of course, and collected book of poetry is going to have some duds, that has been the case with any of the authors we read in that class; but hers seemed to stand above the rest.

[Rosa Jamali · Rating 5 out of 5]

چند شعر از هیلدا دولیتل به ترجمه ی رُزا جمالی





1

ارواحِ دخترِ کوه‌ها





بچرخ دریا!
بچرخ با کاج های سوزنی ات
و بیافشان بر ما
بپوشان ما را
به کاج های عظیم ات
برصخره هامان بپاش
و با سبزی ات ما را به گِرد خود بگیر
و با حوضی پر از کاج بپوشان ما را...





2

برخاستنِ ماه





آیا بر دریا می درخشی؟

یا نشانِ تیرت را بر ساحلی خواهی انداخت؟

آن چیست که به ضربتی چوگانی فرستاده می‌شود؟



آوازی در سرداریم،

لبِ رودخانه تیر و کمان‌هامان را قسمت خواهیم کرد.



نخ ها به آرامی سُست می شوند

و کلماتِ ما را خواهند خواند.



ای پرواز،

او را به تکانی به آواز بیاور

او بی‌همتاست

او را با درختانِ کاج اندازه خواهیم گرفت.






3



گُل سرخِ دریا





ای ستمگر،

گلِ سرخ!

بی شکل در انبوهی از گُلبرگ‌هات

ای گُلِ بی اندام

نحیف

تکیده در برگ‌هات.



تو گرانبهاتری

از گُلی که خیس شده

تنها یک ساقه مانده

تو را در جریانِ باد گرفتم.



بی شکل شده در تک‌برگی

تو بر شن ها فرو افتادی

در تردی شن‌ها

جا به جاییِ بادها



می تواند آیا

این رایحه‌ی تند

از آن گُل به جا مانده باشد

که در تک‌برگی فشرده شده؟



4

درختِ گلابی



گرد و غبار نقره ای رنگ

از زمین برخاسته است

بلندتر از آنچه بازوانم بدان برسند

تو برزمین نشسته ای

ای نقره

بلندتر از آنچه بازوانم بتوانند به آن برسند

تو با توده ای به مقابله با ما برخواسته‌ای



هیچ گلی هیچوقت باز نشد

برگی سپید رنگ، بی هیچ منفذی

هیچ گلی نقره ای نشد

از آن نقره ای نادر



ای گلابی سپید رنگ

غنچه های کوچک ات

که بر شاخه ها ضخیم شده اند

تابستان و میوه های تازه را خواهند آورد

در قلب های بنفش رنگ‌‌شان...



5



شقایق های دریا





ته گلها، سبوس کهربایی رنگی ست

که با طلا نواخته شده

میوه ای بر شن

که به دانه ای غنی متمایز شده بود



گنج

کنار درختچه های کاج ریخته می شود

که سنگها را سفید کند



ساقه های تو ریشه را گرفته اند

میان سنگ ریزه های خیس

شبیه توده ای آویخته بردریا

و گوش ماهی ها که ریز شده بودند

و صدف های حلزونی که شکسته بودند



زیبا، پخش می شود

آتشی بر برگ

آنچه بر چمن تسلیم می شود

برگی رایحه گون

شبیه برگ روشن ات؟



5

زنبق دریا



1

علف، علفِ جلبکی

ریشه در شن گره می خورد

زنبق دریا، گلی شکننده

گلبرگی که شبیه صدفی شکسته است

و تو سایه ای را نشر می دهی

که شبیه شاخه درخت نازک است.



آن خوشبخت

که معطر است و تیز

غنچه‌ی کندری که مسلم است

گل کافوری

شیرین و شور، تو بر بادی

در پره های بینی ما



2

آیا غواصان صدف

ترا خیس می کنند چنانکه می گذرند؟

آیا ریشه هایت رنگ شن ها را به خود می کشند؟

طلایی که پرچ شده می لغزاند کُنه تو را؟



دسته ای از گل های زنبق

بر بالای موج ها

تو به رنگ آبی در آمدهای

شبیه دماغه‌ی کشتی تازه رنگ شده ای

و در نمک علفها لکه گرفتی.



هیلدا دولیتل از مهم ترین شاعران تصویرپردازست، او از معاصران و معاشران ازراپاوند بوده است و هارولد بلوم نظریه پرداز علم تاویل کتابی بر آثار او نوشته است. شعرهای او از ظرافت و لطافتی زنانهبرخوردارست. توصیفات بسیار دقیق و موشکافانه ی او از گلها ، گیاهان، درخت ها و طبیعت وحشی اعجاب آورست. دولیتل به اساطیر یونان باستان علاقه ی ویژه ای دارد و عنوان بسیاری از شعرهایش را اینگونه انتخاب کرده است.
http://rosajamali.blogfa.com/post/68

[Mert · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Janel D. Brubaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first encountered the complicated poems of Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) in my last term of undergrad. I took a Modernist Literature class and we read H.D.'s trilogy of poetry, "Trilogy." I remember being then enamored with her use of language, the ways she stepped outside of what might be considered "feminine" poetry to write about World War II. I remember being struck by the beautiful violence of the language she used, how she described being displaced by the war, and the ways in which she captured the trauma of that time.

So I was excited to return to her work this year. And to be honest, I was underwhelmed. Outside of the Trilogy, her writing, while certainly not bad or of poor quality, is...bland. A little lacking in flavor. She has a truly unusual way with words and metaphor, but taken as a whole, I found myself unable to focus or really commit myself to perusing her poems with any energy.

Perhaps this was more due to the other stressors I had to consider at the time (Covid, work, school, working on my thesis, etc). Perhaps her poetry only seemed lackluster because so many of the other books I read were genuinely astonishing. Perhaps I was simply too tired to really absorb the poems I thought I would be as obsessed with as I was the first time I read her work. Regardless of the reason, I was disconnected from her collected poems.

I still must recommend H.D. to anyone wanting to study poetry, and especially modernism. Her work really is filled with emotion, with evocation, and with an animated sense of being human that I've never quite found in any other poet at that time. And, in any case, reading any poetry is infinitely better than reading none, so definitely check out H.D. But rather than starting with her collected poems, I suggest reading Trilogy first. That is, in my opinion, where she shines brightest.

[Paloma Etienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will never forget Sea Garden, it freed me. After reading H.D. love feels like an emptied word. Once you read about sea violets and sea roses and sea gardens you realise that what you believed about love was too artificial. You really crave the thought after that that maybe flowers are just better, better than love, than the word love. Maybe it's all about flowers and sea gardens. H.D. has broken down my defences and I feel my imagery has been ambushed by the lack of hers in my own mind. It would be unfair if it wasn't because this is a new creative lifestyle of feelings, a force of nature that drives you to give in to the flooding.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

H. D. is my poetic inspiration - she is an amazing poet. A Modernist, a feminist, and a brave, audacious writer in the face of her many critics. I love reading and re-reading her poetry: aggressive, fierce, visceral, but so lyrical, evocative, and full of passion. I can't get enough of her poetry. Combined with Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born and Luce Irigaray's analysis of the Mother-Daughter relationship in the Demeter-Persephone myth, Doolittle's poetry inspires and encourages my own work-in-progress poetry collecction.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the read, filled with names and stories from Greek and Roman history and mythology. It is helpful if these mean something to you, but even if they do not, the language used in the poems is beautiful and creates a full world.

[James Debruicker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess, I read this going "ok, yeah, yeah, nature is pretty, I get it. Get to the part where you write about the shitty relationships you have and how much D.H. Lawrence sucks." The woo-woo nature pretty poems are well done, but the shitty relationship poems are holyshit good.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fell in love with some of H.D.'s poetry in a course I took on Literature By and About Women. She uses a lot of mythological characters and stories. My favorite thus far is "Oread."

[Aelia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like her, as a person, as a woman.. because of her life.. and some poems. but still as a poetress she is not the ONE I would LOOOVE AND aDMIREEE....

[Elizabeth]

Still reading and thinking here. Strong images. The more I read about her, the more interesting it gets.

[Ann Bogle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite poet.

[Michael Treiman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked these originally due to their mythical themes and descriptions of nature... Now I see the sexual dimension and they all read like pornos.