HD et al

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

—Ezra Pound

The Imagist movement included English and American poets in the early twentieth century who wrote free verse and were devoted to "clarity of ｅxpression through the use of precise visual images." A strand of modernism, Imagism was officially launched in 1912 when Ezra Pound read and marked up a poem by Hilda Doolittle, signed it "H.D. Imagiste," and sent it to Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine.

The movement sprang from ideas developed by T.E. Hulme, who as early as 1908 was proposing to the Poets' Club in London a poetry based on absolutely accurate presentation of its subject with no excess verbiage. The first tenet of the Imagist manifesto was "To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word."

Imagism was a reaction against the flabby abstract language and "careless thinking" of Georgian Romanticism. Imagist poetry aimed to replace muddy abstractions with exactness of observed detail, apt metaphors, and economy of language. For example, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" started from a glimpse of beautiful faces in a dark subway and elevated that perception into a crisp vision by finding an intensified equivalent image. The metaphor provokes a sharp, intuitive discovery in order to get at the essence of life.

Pound's definition of the image was "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Pound defined the tenets of Imagist poetry as:

I. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.
II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

An Imagist anthology was published in 1914 that collected work by William Carlos Williams, Richard Aldington, and James Joyce, as well as H.D. and Pound. Other imagists included F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, and John Gould Fletcher. By the time the anthology appeared, Amy Lowell had effectively appropriated Imagism and was seen as the movement's leader. Three years later, even Amy Lowell thought the movement had run its course. Pound by then was claiming that he invented Imagism to launch H.D.'s career. Though Imagism as a movement was over by 1917, the ideas about poetry embedded in the Imagist doctrine profoundly influenced free verse poets throughout the twentieth century.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5658#sthash.QjqOnd2x.dpuf

 

 

H. D.: (1886 - 1961)

She continued her association with the group until the final issue of the Some Imagist Poets anthology in 1917. She and Aldington did most of the editorial work on the 1915 anthology. Her work also appeared in Aldington's Imagist Anthology 1930. All of her poetry up to the end of the 1930s was written in an Imagist mode, utilising spare use of language,^[18] and a classical, austere purity.^[19] This style of writing was not without its critics. In a special Imagist issue of The Egoist magazine in May 1915, the poet and critic Harold Monro called H.D.'s early work "petty poetry", denoting "either poverty of imagination or needlessly excessive restraint."

[Levenson, Michael. "A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 162.]

 

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Sea Rose (1916)

Rose, harsh rose, 
marred and with stint of petals, 
meagre flower, thin, 
sparse of leaf, 

more precious 
than a wet rose 
single on a stem -- 
you are caught in the drift. 

Stunted, with small leaf, 
you are flung on the sand, 
you are lifted 
in the crisp sand 
that drives in the wind. 

Can the spice-rose 
drip such acrid fragrance 
hardened in a leaf? 

H.D. was one of The Literary Women of the twentieth century. She rubbed elbows with the artists and writers who shaped modernism. Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Sigmund Freud, and Marianne Moore all played important roles in her life, for better or for worse. (Ezra Pound may have said some not-so-nice things about her work. But, then again, he'd always been a pretty big jerk.) Like many modernist writers, H.D. was born in the United States but spent most of her life in Europe, part of an avant-garde expatriate community.

H.D. was front and center in the Imagist poetry movement. See, before modernist poetry came around, poems were just shorter versions of stories. Think about it: when you read nineteenth-century poetry, you're probably going for a walk in the woods or looking at pictures of other folks' dead wives. (Check out "My Last Duchess." You'll see what we mean.)

The modernist poets changed all of that. H.D.'s work refashions the traditional subjects of poetry. "Sea Rose," the first poem in her first book, is just the tip of the iceberg. Like other modernists, she was deeply interested in mythological structures – she even translated several Greek works. And her later works weave myth, psychoanalysis, and feminism into dense Imagist works.

 

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Borderline: (1930)

 

"Judged on its own merits, Borderline is a ground-breaking work, dealing as it does with issues of race and sexuality at a time when such subject matter was still largely taboo and had only been previously tackled cinematically through oblique inference".^[3] It would be decades before the cinematic community would once again tackle the subject matter raised in Borderline. At the time of its release, Borderline was a film that confused and bewildered critics leading the London Evening Standard’s Clive MacManus to advise Macpherson “to spend a year in a commercial studio” before attempting something as difficult again. Deeply upset by its hostile reception, Macpherson archived his film and withdrew from film directing. Macpherson’s work would go on to influence future film-makers such as Nathaniel Dorsky and Robert Beavers.

 

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Classroom Issues and Strategies

Like much modernist poetry (e.g., Pound, Eliot), H.D.'s poetry is "difficult" for students. Mythological and biblical allusions are common in her poetry. Her imagist poetry is "impersonal" (like Eliot's)--that is, its relationship to human emotion is often deeply encoded. Her epic poetry is vast and complex in scope; its linguistic, religious, and psychological dimensions are sophisticated and multi-layered. Her perspective as a woman is quite different from the modernist male poets with whom she shares a great deal.

I have found students very responsive to H.D. when I have used the following strategies. Contextualize H.D.'s work in relationship to (1) modernism (students often expect a male poet to be "difficult," but resist having to work hard to read a woman poet); (2) women's poetry and feminist theory--especially feminist concepts of revision of patriarchal myths and traditions; (3) the mythological allusions (get students to relax and see that without footnotes, H.D. provides all the information they need); (4) the musical and syntactic structures of her poetic language. Her imagist poems can be read as poems about the (female) self resisting stereotypical femininity (they are not "nature" poems). I have had great success in teaching Trilogy as a poem about war from a pacifist perspective akin to Virginia Woolf's in Three Guineas.

Students are intrigued by the following: (1) Gender. They are fascinated by H.D. as a window into the problems and achievements of women's creativity. They love, for example, to read her famous "sea garden" poems (e.g., "Sea Rose") as encoded statements of female vulnerability and rejection of a suffocating femininity. (2) War and peace. Students are very interested and moved by her response to war. They are intrigued by the goddesses and matriarchal religions. (3) Initially, students are afraid of H.D.--real "poetry anxiety." They think they won't be able to understand it because it has so many allusions. But when they are given a framework for thinking about the poetry, they are very responsive.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues

The headnote summarizes the major themes. To summarize, I think H.D. should be taught with emphasis on the following themes:

1. her attempt to understand the roots of cataclysmic violence and propose a revision of renewal and peace

2. the intersection of the historical and the personal in her stance as a woman

3. her characteristically modernist sense of quest in a shattered and war-torn world

4. her sense of the sacred, manifested in both female and male forms

5. her exploration of language--its magic (as logos), its music, its power as something women can claim to reconstitute gender and a vision of the cosmos

 

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

H.D. is best taught as a modernist and a woman writer. The selections give you the opportunity to show her development from an imagist poet in the teens to an epic poet of the 1940s and 1950s. Her imagist poetry--represented here by two poems from Sea Garden ("Sea Rose" and "The Helmsman") and her most frequently anthologized poem "Oread" (often discussed as the "perfect" imagist poem)--was highly innovative in its form and a central influence on modern poetry. Imagism, however, became a craft in the service of larger visions after 1917. "Helen," published in the 1920s, is characteristic of a large number of revisionist myth poems that she began writing in her post-imagist phase and that have had a strong influence on contemporary women's poetry. In writing epics (some critics prefer the term "long poem"), H.D. went against the engrained masculine conventions of the genre to forge a woman's epic form. The selections from The Walls Do Not Fall and Tribute to the Angels (the first two volumes from Trilogy) emphasize the poet's placement in history (literally, in London, during the nightly bombing raids of World War II) and the syncretist mythmaking of the modernist poet-prophet. These sequences can be taught in the context of religious poetry, but students should be encouraged to compare her female-centered vision with those traditions that she transforms. In teaching any of H.D.'s poetry, its strong musical quality can be emphasized. Within the vers libre tradition, she nonetheless established complex patterns of sound based on assonance, dissonance, occasional rhyme (including internal and off rhymes), rhythmic and syntactic patterns, and repetition.

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Wallace Stevens: (1879 - 1955)

The sheer difficulty of apprehending meaning from some of Stevens's poems turns many students away. Yet Stevens is one of the most apt voices to speak about the perfection, and the perfectibility, of the poem-- the supreme fiction in the writer's, and the reader's, lives. If students can read Stevens's poems well, they will probably be able to read anything in the text.

The elusiveness of meaning is one key difficulty: Stevens's valiant attempts to avoid paraphrase, to lose himself in brilliant language, to slide into repetition and assonantal patterns without warning. His work demands complete concentration, and complete sympathy, from his readers. Most students cannot give poetry either of these tributes without some preparation.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

Stevens's intricate stanza and rhyme patterns are a school of poetry in themselves, and each of his poems should be studied as a crafted object. His work fits well with that of T. S. Eliot, as does some of his aesthetic rationale: "Poetry is not personal." "The real is only the base. But it is the base." "In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all." "Poetry must be irrational." "The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself." "Poetry increases the feeling for reality." "In the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate."

Original Audience

Modernism was so specific a mood and time that students must understand the modernists' rage for control of craft, the emphasis on the formalism of the way an art object was formed, and the importance craft held for all parts of the artist's life. once those conventions are described, and Stevens placed in this period, his own distinctions from the group of modernists will be clearer. ("Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this." "A change of style is a change of subject." "In the long run the truth does not matter.") Conscious of all the elements of form, Stevens yet overlays his work with a heavily philosophical intention, and the shelves of commentary on his poetry have been occasioned because that commentary is, in many cases, useful.

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Gertrude Stein: (1874 - 1946)

Stein attended Radcliffe College, then an annex of Harvard University, from 1893 to 1897 and was a student of psychologist William James. With James's supervision, Stein and another student, Leon Mendez Solomons, performed experiments on normal motor automatism, a phenomenon hypothesized to occur in people when their attention is divided between two simultaneous intelligent activities such as writing and speaking.

These experiments yielded examples of writing that appeared to represent "stream of consciousness", a psychological theory often attributed to James and the style of modernist authors Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In 1934, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner interpreted Stein's difficult poem Tender Buttons as an example of normal motor automatism.^[10] In a letter Stein wrote during the 1930s, she explained that she never accepted the theory of automatic writing: "[T]here can be automatic movements, but not automatic writing. Writing for the normal person is too complicated an activity to be indulged in automatically."^[11]

At Radcliffe, she began a lifelong friendship with Mabel Foote Weeks, whose correspondence traces much of the progression of Stein's life. In 1897, Stein spent the summer in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studying embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory.^[12]

 

William James became a committed mentor to Stein at Radcliffe, recognizing her intellectual potential, and declaring her his "most brilliant woman student". James encouraged Stein to enroll in medical school, although Stein professed she had no interest in either the theory or practice of medicine. She spent two years at Johns Hopkins Medical School, failing two courses and leaving without a degree. Ultimately, medical school had bored Stein, and she had spent many of her evenings not applying herself to her studies, but taking long walks and attending the opera.^[5][13]

Stein's tenure at Johns Hopkins was marked by challenge and stress. Men dominated the medical field, and the inclusion of women in the profession was not unreservedly or unanimously welcomed. Writing of this period in her life ("Things As They Are", 1903) Stein often revealed herself as a depressed young woman dealing with a paternalistic culture, struggling to find her own identity which she realized could not conform to the conventional female role. Her uncorseted physical appearance and eccentric mode of dress aroused comment and she was described as "Big and floppy and sandaled and not caring a damn".^[14][15]

Asked to give a lecture to a group of Baltimore women in 1899, Stein gave a controversial speech titled "The Value of College Education for Women", undoubtedly designed to provoke the largely middle-class audience. In the lecture Stein maintained:

"average middle class woman [supported by] some male relative, a husband or father or brother,...[is] not worth her keep economically considered." [This economic dependence caused her to become] oversexed...adapting herself to the abnormal sex desire of the male...and becoming a creature that should have been first a human being and then a woman into one that is a woman first and always."

While a student at Johns Hopkins and purportedly still naïve about sexual matters, Stein experienced an awakening of her latent sexuality. Sometime in 1899 or 1900, she became infatuated with Mary Bookstaver who was involved in a relationship with a medical student, Mabel Haynes. Witnessing the relationship between the two women served for Stein as her "erotic awakening". The unhappy love triangle demoralized Stein, arguably contributing to her decision to abandon her medical studies.^[15]

In 1902 Stein's brother Leo Stein left for London, and Stein followed. The following year the two relocated to Paris, where Leo hoped to pursue an art career.^[13]

 

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Marianne Moore: (1887 - 1972)

Moore came to the attention of poets as diverse as Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Ezra Pound beginning with her first publication in 1915. From 1925 until 1929, Moore served as editor of the literary and cultural journal The Dial. This continued her role, similar to that of Pound, as a patron of poetry; much later, she encouraged promising young poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and James Merrill.

 

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John Ashbery: (1927 - )

Ashbery's works are characterized by a free-flowing, often disjunctive syntax; extensive linguistic play, often infused with considerable humor; and a prosaic, sometimes disarmingly flat or parodic tone. The play of the human mind is the subject of a great many of his poems. Ashbery once said that his goal was "to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about."^[17] Formally, the earliest poems show the influence of conventional poetic practice, yet by The Tennis Court Oath a much more revolutionary engagement with form appears. Ashbery returned to something approaching a reconciliation between tradition and innovation with many of the poems in The Double Dream of Spring,^[18] though his Three Poems are written in long blocks of prose. Although he has never again approached the radical experimentation of The Tennis Court Oath poems or "The Skaters" and "Into the Dusk-Charged Air" from his collection Rivers and Mountains, syntactic and semantic experimentation, linguistic expressiveness, deft, often abrupt shifts of register, and insistent wit remain consistent elements of his work.

 

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E. E. Cummings: (1894 - 1962)

In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.

After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.

In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill's." Serving as Cummings' debut to a wider American audience, these "experiments" foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.

In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic ｅxpression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work towards further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.

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Allen Ginsberg: (1926 - 1997)

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (/ˈɡɪnzbərɡ/; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression. Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem "Howl", in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States.^[1][2]

In 1957, "Howl" attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it depicted heterosexual and homosexual sex^[3] at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. "Howl" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner.^[4] Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"^[5]

Ginsberg was a practising Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in second-hand stores and residing in downscale apartments in New York’s East Village.^[6] One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University at Boulder, Colorado.^[7] At Trungpa's urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974.^[8]

Ginsberg took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs.^[9] His poem "September on Jessore Road," calling attention to the plight of Bangladeshi refugees, exemplifies what the literary critic Helen Vendler described as Ginsberg's tireless persistence in protesting against "imperial politics, and persecution of the powerless."^[10]

His collection The Fall of America shared the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974.^[11] In 1979 he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.^[12]Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992.^[13]

 

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Elizabeth Bishop: (1911 - 1979)

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), poet, was born on 8 February 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father died before her first birthday, and her mother suffered a series of nervous collapses and was committed to a mental hospital when Bishop was five, thus being permanently removed from the life of her only child. From ages three to six, Bishop lived in Great Village, Nova Scotia, with her mother's parents, and was then taken in by her father's family in Worcester and Boston. She attended Walnut Hill School near Boston during her high-school years, followed by four years at Vassar. By way of the Vassar librarian, in New York Bishop met the poet Marianne Moore, twenty-four years her senior, and their friendship quickly flourished. Her earliest work, which was influenced by George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Moore, appeared in the Vassar undergraduate magazine she had helped to found. Having briefly considered a career in medicine, she turned to poetry with the encouragement of Moore, who published a handful of her poems in an anthology called Trial Balances in 1935. In residence in New York for a year, she wrote her first mature poems, including "The Map" and "The Man-Moth." She then lived intermittently in Europe for three years before purchasing a house in Key West, Florida, in 1938. After being rejected by several New York publishers, the first of her four volumes of poetry, North and South, was finally published in 1946. The next year she was introduced by Randall Jarrell to Robert Lowell, who became a lifelong friend.

In 1951, the geographical displacement in her life continued when she took ill on a trip to South America; left behind by a freighter in Brazil, she made that country her home for the next eighteen years. Her lesbian relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares gave her life stability and love, and she established residences in Rio de Janeiro, nearby Petrópolis, and, later, Ouro Prêto. A Cold Spring, her second volume of poetry, appeared in 1955. Brazil became the setting for many of the poems that were collected a decade later in Questions of Travel (1965).

After the suicide of Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop increasingly began to live in the United States, and became poet-in-residence at Harvard University in 1969. A close friendship with Alice Methfessel began in 1971 and continued until the time of Bishop's death in 1979. Her final poetry volume, Geography III,was published in 1976,

Bishop often spent many years writing a single poem, working toward an effect of offfhandedness and spontaneity. Committed to a "passion for accuracy," she re-created her worlds of Canada, America, Europe, and Brazil. Shunning self-pity, the poems thinly conceal her estrangements as a woman, a lesbian, an orphan, a geographically rootless traveler, a frequently hospitalized asthmatic, and a sufferer of depression and alcoholism. "I'm not interested in big-scale work as such," she once told Lowell. "Something needn't be large to be good."

Manuscript holdings are at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Vassar College Library; and the Washington University Libraries.