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Modernist poet H.D. saw ancient Greek words as portals and gates to new ways of writing. Her Imagist poems often push against the medium of the printed page, taking on qualities of Classical artifacts and modernist paintings. What happens when H.D.’s Hellenism generates literal portals for architectural design? And how might these crossings of materials and academic disciplines foretell future modernisms? This essay reconsiders H.D.’s Imagist practice to propose that her iconic poems are not painterly at heart, but architectural. Collaborating as a literary critic and an architect, we bring these early poems into conversation with recent work from an undergraduate design studio in the University of Florida’s School of Architecture. Our analysis also offers an ex-centric narrative of modernist making—one that considers the outlier spaces housing H.D.’s vanguard poems, the ways “Oread” occupies the space of the page and its spatial transformations, and the poem’s provocations for emergent spaces in students’ design projects. Crossing materials and disciplinary thresholds, the future of modernist poetry will create and occupy new spaces in the university curriculum.

As prompted by letters of the 1960s from Mary Renault to Bryher, addressing their shared métier of historical fiction, this essay recognizes affinities, as yet largely unacknowledged, between the mid-century fiction of Mary Renault, often informed by her engagement with Ancient Greece, and the earlier Hellenism of modernist writer H.D., as well as the vein of modernist Hellenism H.D.’s work exemplifies. Like Renault, H.D. and other modernist writers often enlist Hellenism as historical fiction that conjures past worlds—to comment on, and provide alternative vocabulary for issues of, the present. Comparison of Renault’s and H.D.’s shared gravitation toward myths associated with the figure of Theseus—which they both engage in a spirit of revision—further illuminates the way that, like Renault’s turn to Ancient Greece, much early modernist work was animated by efforts to rethink gender and sexuality. Yet comparing Renault’s and H.D.’s retellings of myths connected with Theseus also uncovers the major areas of difference between them, revealing the patriarchal allegiances and misogynistic costs of Renault’s modes of reworking, at a marked distance from H.D.’s forms of feminist re-vision.

The paper is aimed at filling the gap in learning the formative image peculiarities of the English and American Imagistic poetry by analyzing the correspondence of the internal and the external and their correlation. This is where the answer lies, why T.S. Eliot called Imagism “an opening salvo” of English/ American Modernist poetry. It also explains the reason for a long-term effect of this short-term “school” in the English poetry of the twentieth century. Imagism hasn’t left any extended or profound theory as far as the criteria for producing “hard, dry images” (T.E.Hulme) are concerned. Since then the problem has been under-studied and calls for more in-depth analysis. The modern theoretical background of the paper includes the ideas of S. Averintsev and M. Gasparov, Paul Ricoeur and Gaston Bachelard; the criticism of the Imagism founders (T.E. Hulme and E. Pound) as well as its present-day English and American researchers. The major theoretical points highlight the important features of image transformation in Imagism: the dual (semantic and psychological) nature of an image (P. Ricoeur); loss of its axiological constituent thus forfeiting its wholeness (M. Girshman); its non-permanent essence (G. Bachelard). All these “new” sides underlie too general and vague definition of an image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” given by Ezra Pound, his definitive denial of using images as “ornaments” and the emphasis on the image affiliation with speech, not language. The fight doesn’t have to be limited only to opposing Romanticism (as in Hulme’s “Romanticism and Classicism”). Equally significant and far more sophisticated is the distinction between Symbolic and Imagistic essence of an image (Pound’s “Retrospect” and “Gaudier Brzeska”). For Pound, the main criterion is the receptive potential of an image, its semantic openness which offsets its meaning as finally fixed in some symbol. The paper examines the possibility to apply Roland Barthes’s idea (“L`imagination du signe”, 1962) of the crucial influence of the interior (symbolic) relationship and two exterior (paradigmatic and syntagmatic) relationships on the formation of both single image and the total imagery of a certain type of art conscience – consequently, of Symbolism, Romanticism and Imagism. In the early period of Imagism development (the poetry of F. Flint, E. Storer, to a lesser extent, of T.E. Hulme) the images still preserve the inner affinity with the signified objects (concepts) as seen in Romantic and Symbolic image “patterns”. And throughout Imagism development, this inner affinity is being weakened until a distant outer resemblance is left. It is clearly seen in Hulme’s “Autumn”, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”, H.D.’s “Oread”, “Hermes of the Ways” et al. The close reading of the W.C. Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is carried out in front of the “Tall Nettles” by Edward Thomas (1878–1917), his contemporary, who is now considered to be one of the “non-Modernist modern” poets. It is stated that the central image of the red wheelbarrow in its every detail constitutes a modern pastoral while Thomas’s nettles stand for psychological matrix of personal melancholy and despair. Syntagmatic relations also involve the further interaction of signs in the form of “superposition”, forming montage as one of the important Мodernist techniques not only in poetry, but also in Мodernist prose. And it becomes evident that it is not a mechanically borrowed cinema technique, as it is commonly viewed, but a deeper, “syntagmatic” similarity. The result of the research, based on the analysis undertaken, seems to prove its initial point: the poems of T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, W. Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) taken as models, manifest that the image in Imagism is every time constructed as a new actual syntagma of the common imagination of a poet and a reader to become the unique image for every single poem without its further “universal” use in any virtual paradigm.

In this essay I would like to analyse biographical writing by three female modernist writers: H.D.’s HERmione, Bryher’s A Heart to Artemis, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. How do these biographic novels draw on mythology to constitute the writing woman (of modernism)? At first, I would like to analyse these novels with regard to the question of how they try to articulate a biography of a female writer against the lack of historical models. Here, I would like to add readings of Virginia Woolfs A Room of One’s Own, as a take on the issue of missing cultural history of female writing. Secondly, the implementation of mythology in these texts will be analysed. Here I would like to add readings of H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, as a take on the issue of missing literary and cultural representation of women by women. Lastly, I would like to establish how these female authors are writing themselves in relation to the man-centred artistic world of their time. Here I would like to add reading of Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as a take on the competition of female writers with their male counterparts at their time.

This article looks at the presence of Monte Carlo in two neglected texts: H.D.'s short story 'Mira-Mare' (1934) and her close friend Robert Herring's novel Cactus Coast (1934). Read alongside autobiographical essays and archival correspondence, a rich dialogue forms between H.D. and Herring's texts, which narrates the inner workings of the POOL group. I argue for the consideration of 'Mira-Mare' and Cactus Coast as POOL texts, as they document crucial moments that shaped POOL's networks of queer intimacy and engage with POOL's central questions of identity and relationality. Written by two central members of the POOL group's network, 'Mira-Mare' and Cactus Coast were supported by the same funds, editorial presence, and printer as POOL's labelled outputs. By tracing the connections between H.D. and Herring's texts, further insight into the POOL group's activity can be mapped, positioning Monte Carlo as a crucial locus within POOL's artistic production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book offers an alternative literary history of modernism and contemporary poetry that moves H.D., Pound, Lawrence and Williams to its center, and that thus positions poets influenced by these four (including himself) as foundational to the post-WWII era. He also offers a narrative of H.D.’s career that elevates her poetry over her prose, which he sees as impure, mired in venery. For Duncan, Venice and Venus are at the heart of the problem with H.D.’s “Venetian” middle career. This paper will plumb representations of Venice and Venus in H.D.’s Trilogy and Duncan’s “The Venice Poem,” demonstrating how what H.D. termed “Venice-Venus” is central to Duncan’s notion of the modern American literary canon.

"[T]he bone-frame was made for / no such shock knit within terror": the first poem in H.D.'s The Walls Do Not Fall equates the human body to a bombed building, the word "frame" encapsulating the mutual implication of urban, human, and poetic structures in H.D.'s wartime poetry. In the writing of poets living and working in London during World War II, the civilian experience of war is not merely documented and alluded to; the Blitz also provides a pressing material reference to architectural metaphors used to figure poetic form. In the context of a number of wartime publications, civilian records, and postwar lyric theory, H.D's and T.S. Eliot's wartime works emerge as engaging with a number of such formal implications: the dissolution of architectural structures, the navigability of fragmented urban topographies, and patterns of continuity in the face of violently disrupted routines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have traced the influences of theoretical science in modernist poetry. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century western audiences were principally enamoured of the applied sciences (or engineering) and especially the ideal of efficiency. The principles and processes of engineering permeated modernism, including its poetry, and, accordingly, the ‘science’ of modernist poetry is often an applied science. Specifically, Imagist and Objectivist poets implemented processes of optimisation and systematisation, which dramatise the iterative improvements that characterised the contemporaneous Efficiency Movement. That movement’s exemplar, Frederick Winslow Taylor, is remembered for conforming factory labour and labourers to exacting empirical ideals, leading this study to question the social repercussions of perfectly ‘efficient’ poems. However, poets H.D. and Charles Reznikoff actually disperse this impracticable ideal through their process-oriented forms. Thus, the modernist poetry inspired by the applied sciences revolves around scientific ideals, but it ultimately emphasises their fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like Tender Is the Night , H.D.'s neglected story Kora and Ka was published in 1934 and explores the intersection of war, incest, and national identity. Placing H.D.'s story alongside Fitzgerald's novel challenges our understanding of the novel as a meditation on its author's (and Dick Diver's) disillusionment with U.S. nationalism. Through their incest plots, the two works reveal a complex postwar condition in which melancholia, or unresolvable grief, sustains patriotism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translations of summary This article presents a unique collection of narratives of separation - unique because the separation here is from psychoanalysis and from Freud as analyst. These narratives were published as part of memoirs written about Freud by three of his patients. Their narratives of separation give us an innovative point of view on the psychoanalytic process, in particular with respect to the importance they place on the termination phase of the analysis at a time when Freud himself had not given it much consideration. The three autobiographical texts are Abram Kardiner's memoir (1977); the memoir of Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man (Gardiner, ); and 'Tribute to Freud', by the poet H.D. (). These three distinguished narratives are discussed here as works of translation, as understood by Walter Benjamin (1968 [1955]), Paul Ricoeur (2006 [2004]), and Jean Laplanche (1999 [1992]). They express translation under three aspects: reconstruction of the past (the work of memory), interpreting the conscious residues of the transference (the work of mourning), and, as a deferred action, deciphering the enigmatic messages received from Freud as the parental figure. This representation of the analysand's writing suggests that the separation from analysis is an endless work of translation within the endless process of deciphering the unconscious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a journal entry from 1957, H.D. writes that Adorno’s description of the aging of modernist music might easily apply to the fate of her own work in the post-war period: “Among other fascinating things, he [Adorno] says that Bartók ‘could not quite live up to his own avant-guardism’ [sic] […]. I felt the phrase applied, in a way, to myself and my Helen sequence” (H.D. 2015, p. 40). H.D.’s remark refers to her long poem, Helen in Egypt (1960), which, with its engagement with classical sources and epic themes, seemed to some to be a throwback to an earlier modernist period in which Pound, Joyce, Eliot and H.D. herself had looked to ancient models as a means of reinvigorating modern literature. What did it mean for H.D. to feel that her work had outlived its time, to be a first-generation modernist still writing in that mode after many of her peers and their achievements had passed into history? This article explores H.D.’s sense that her practice was at odds with contemporary demands for poetry to answer to immediate historical concerns. It also considers her case against the critics in letters, notes and in Helen in Egypt which contains its own defense of the relevance of classical modernism to the post-war present day.

This article focuses on the role of embroidery in H.D.'s life and work in the 1940s. Bringing the tropes of tapestry, writing, and spiritualism together gave H.D. a means to explore possibilities for both personal and social healing following the trauma of the war years and to express her hopes for a world without war. Moreover, H.D. used tapestry as a metaphor that allowed her to explore her affiliation to nineteenth-century poets, particularly William Morris, while also enabling the development of her modernist style to a more extreme dynamic of rupture and connection. The article situates H.D.'s embroidery in the context of wider discourses on women's amateur textile craft and Morris's work in textiles and literature, before considering H.D.'s use of tapestry as a creative practice and metaphor in her late novel The Sword Went Out to Sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is an epistemological interrogation and should be read as one possible approach among others to H.D.'s poetic experiment in Trilogy. It argues that the empiricist tradition provides us with a series of concepts that may help us make sense of the poem, or, rather, understand a little better how the poem makes sense. In this respect, H.D.'s numerous polytheistic mythological allusions can be problematized as being at the service of a philosophy of the human subject, not considered as a fixed, alienated entity, but as a constantly evolving multiplicity whose main activity is to construct new relations or syntheses, thereby endlessly constructing itself in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

H.D. is both a familiar figure of the Imagist movement fashioned by Ezra Pound and an elusive author of “high modernism.” Primarily known as a poet, H.D. wrote a lot of posthumously published autobiographical prose to disentangle herself from the enshrouding influence of Imagism and the “war trauma.” Shakespeare is a powerful ally for he embodies the intersection between the personal and the literary, the real and the fictional. His plays underwrite H.D.’s autobiographical prose in relation to family, history and identity. H.D. excavates Shakespeare and his plays to reinscribe them in a new body of work – a strategy which enables her to engage with the male literary history and re-vise it by establishing a familial rather than adversarial relation to tradition. This article envisions the complex interactions between Shakespeare’s text and H.D.’s prose as the cornerstone of her positioning as woman writer in the economy of literary creation. It explores the creative diversions and reappropriations of Shakespeare’s plays that H.D. resorts to, especially her play with onomastics, the evocations and inscriptions of the Bard and his plays in the body of her works as well as a lesser known text, By Avon River, whose theme is Shakespeare himself.

This article considers the figure of the angelus militans in the World War II poetry of H.D., an American-born modernist who lived in London during the Blitz. While there is a long tradition in art and scripture of representing the angel as warrior, the connection between angels and bombs acquires a particular charge in writing by and about first-wave modernists because of their association with machine-dreams and the supposed cutting-off or perverse fulfilment of these dreams in WWII. This article argues that H.D.’s poetry seeks to recover a vision of peace hidden within the scenes of angelic conflict that feature prominently in the history of European art and literature as well as finding new relevance in the writing of her peers including D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis.

Abstract: This article considers two works from H.D.'s Second World War writing: The Gift and The Sword Went Out to Sea. In these texts, H.D. situates herself in the context of diverse intimate communities: her spiritualist circle, her partnership with Bryher, her family and previous generations of Moravians. These communities ground her personal vision of writing as a spiritual exercise that will bring healing to both the individual psyche and the wider society ravaged by war. The significance of community is such that when she becomes isolated, desolation and breakdown follow. The restoration of communication and community through vision and writing leads to healing and a particular understanding of religious modernism as a unity of spiritual and material, transcendent and ordinary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Marian wrote two virtually unknown articles engaging the figure of Athena, patron goddess of Athens, of war, wisdom, and weaving (the primary activity of Greek women). Her discussion of Aeschylus's Oresteia (Tolpin, 1969) shows her struggling with a classical psychoanalytic approach to the text, her spirit moving already to forward edge interpretations. In her article on H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Freud, and Athena (Tolpin, 1991), she grapples with Freud's understanding that H.D. is like the “castrated goddess” figurine on his desk (a small bronze Athena who has lost her spear), and she transforms Freud's classical understanding of H.D... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the visual origins of modernism's impersonal aesthetic through the example of two critical-theoretical works by H.D.: Notes on Thought and Vision (1919) and 'Cinema and the Classics' (1927). It argues that the embodied observer proposed in fin-de-siècle optical science crucially influenced the form and goals of modernist impersonality, and charts two distinct phases in the development of H.D.'s particular version of that aesthetic. In the first phase, H.D. looked to visual art and, in the second, to film and psychoanalysis, as modern visual discourses through which to explore the embodied and fundamentally impersonal nature of subjectivity. Through her visual languages, or 'imagetexts', she considered ultimately the implications of such a subjectivity for embodied identities like gender, sexuality, and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to address and remedy the fact that Freud's clinical use of sculpture has received little sustained attention. After a brief review of the collection, Melanie Klein's clinical use of dolls is discussed as an initial basis for comparison. It then makes a detailed examination of primary evidence found in the published writings and private correspondence of the writer and analysand H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). H.D.'s analysis indicates that Freud used sculpture as an analogue for the ‘foreign body’ of psychical trauma, treating it as a representation of a representation, or Vorstellungrepräsentanz. The sculptures also served Freud's archaeological metaphor for the ‘otherness’ of the unconscious in ways that architectural fragments did not. The author then considers H.D.'s hallucination of Athena Nike and Freud's use of his own damaged sculpture of Athena to raise therapeutic questions about her phallic relation to the signifier in the treatment of her writer's block. This case study is further compared to Klein and to Jung in order to differentiate the use of objects in the clinical setting and to mark some of the limits Freud encountered in H.D.'s second analytic session. The author concludes that purely textual examinations of Freud may have greatly underestimated his clinical use of sculpture in recuperating lost memories as fundamental indices of desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominance of patriarchally-based structures in Kristeva's work sets up an uncomfortable dichotomy for feminist critics. Her 1979 essay `Le temps des femmes' (translated as `Women's Time' in 1981) most explicitly articulates her own approach to feminism, addressing women's troubled relationship to patriarchy in terms of time and space. Kristeva identifies three distinct positions in feminist thought: `equality', `difference' and an anticipated `third generation' feminism that integrates the previous two attitudes, representing what she defines as a new `signifying space'. The value of the `third space' is that it offers a method for proceeding beyond the either/or status offered by previous stages of feminist thought and analysis, challenging gender identity per se and bringing out the singularity of each individual subject. I explore ways of reading from the third space through examples of the `Cassandra' myth and H.D.'s epic poem Helen in Egypt (1974), looking specifically at women's relationship to patriarchal language. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a journal entry from 1957, H.D. writes that Adorno's description of the aging of modernist music might easily apply to the fate of her own work in the post-war period: "Among other fascinating things, he [Adorno] says that Bartók 'could not quite live up to his own avant-guardism' [sic] [...]. I felt the phrase applied, in a way, to myself and my Helen sequence" (H.D. 2015, p. 40). H.D.'s remark refers to her long poem, Helen in Egypt (1960), which, with its engagement with classical sources and epic themes, seemed to some to be a throwback to an earlier modernist period in which Pound, Joyce, Eliot and H.D. herself had looked to ancient models as a means of reinvigorating modern literature. What did it mean for H.D. to feel that her work had outlived its time, to be a first-generation modernist still writing in that mode after many of her peers and their achievements had passed into history? This article explores H.D.'s sense that her practice was at odds with contemporary demands for poetry to answer to immediate historical concerns. It also considers her case against the critics in letters, notes and in Helen in Egypt which contains its own defense of the relevance of classical modernism to the post-war present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of the five English-language poets who experimented most radically with the poetic line in the 1910s, four were women: Mina Loy, H.D., Marianne Moore, and to a lesser extent Gertrude Stein, since she rejected the poetic line altogether in Tender Buttons. The crucial moves away from Whitman’s nineteenth-century aesthetic had to do with the line as seen, as independent of syntax and meter, as restructuring the possibilities of rhyme, and as a unit in tension with other aspects of form, narrative, and voice in a poem. In the hands of these women, the modernist line had appeared in almost every radical configuration of high modernism by the end of 1917. This paper explores the particular innovations of these women in relation to the structures of the modernist poetic line.