Trilogy, H.D. (365 Books, Day 325)
Jul. 25th, 2011 01:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksReview of the book I read Wednesday, July 20th.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) is not one of the poets I imprinted on early, despite her having gone to my college (they don't boast about it the way they do Marianne Moore). I think it is because she was briefly engaged to Ezra Pound, though fortunately she realized better, and then the whole Imagist label that gets stuck onto her work is discouraging. I am not much on Imagist poetry.
So most of what I know about her I have heard fromsovay, who pointed out that I was missing one of the most original women of the twentieth century. Her life is a lovely example of Doing Polyamory Right, and a lot of her work is not Imagist, but riffings on the classical tradition and on Sappho, old myths in new jars. That I find interesting.
Trilogy comprises The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels, and The Flowering of the Rod, which are her Blitz poems. World War II was a very bad time for her. She'd lost a brother in the first World War, and had been to psychoanalysis with Freud in the twenties because she had what was considered to be a paranoiac conviction that a second and worse war was coming. Being proven right was not a consolation.
So her war-poems are an effort to a) argue that the world is all changed, as indeed it was; b) argue that the old stories could be repurposed to the new realities, and that that is what poets and writers and artists are for, in wartime, and so they must not be considered superfluous or less than useful; and c) turn the myths she loved to fit the world around her, that had changed.
The astonishing thing is that she pretty much does it. Points a) and b) go together into the first bit, The Walls Do Not Fall Down, and the other two poems are riffings on c). Tribute to the Angels is the one that's most impressive, if you know much about angel-lore, a densely allusive calling on seven great angels whose names are Biblical and whose purposes in the world are-- not. Her Uriel is a terrifying angel of war: when he is the angel of silence, it is the silence between the bombs.
Her language is modernist, pared down, reminds me of Eliot without his occasional attempts at purposeful obfuscation. When she obfuscates it is because she assumes everyone knows the reference (no, we do not all read classical Hebrew, sorry). Her rhythm is strong and never quite predictable, and her sense of rhyme is true. She does not concede to near-rhymes, ever, nor lets the necessity for a rhyme govern the sense of the words. The form and function are as inseparable as they are with any master poet.
In short, this is lovely stuff, this is brilliant, this is the sort of thing that doesn't make it into the fabled edificiary Western bloody Canon because the author was a mostly-lesbian who had her child choosingly out of wedlock and didn't marry Pound; The Canon could maybe forgive one of those attributes, a child out of wedlock by mistake, say, or respectably monogamous lesbianism, but not more than one, and not marrying Pound may have been deadly anyhow. So her work falls in and out of print, making one to mutter bitter things about Twentieth Century Literature, which somehow feels like a monument rather than a collection of artworks, doesn't it. Poet, novelist, essayist, and master of herself: I look forward to reading more of her.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) is not one of the poets I imprinted on early, despite her having gone to my college (they don't boast about it the way they do Marianne Moore). I think it is because she was briefly engaged to Ezra Pound, though fortunately she realized better, and then the whole Imagist label that gets stuck onto her work is discouraging. I am not much on Imagist poetry.
So most of what I know about her I have heard from
sovay, who pointed out that I was missing one of the most original women of the twentieth century. Her life is a lovely example of Doing Polyamory Right, and a lot of her work is not Imagist, but riffings on the classical tradition and on Sappho, old myths in new jars. That I find interesting.Trilogy comprises The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels, and The Flowering of the Rod, which are her Blitz poems. World War II was a very bad time for her. She'd lost a brother in the first World War, and had been to psychoanalysis with Freud in the twenties because she had what was considered to be a paranoiac conviction that a second and worse war was coming. Being proven right was not a consolation.
So her war-poems are an effort to a) argue that the world is all changed, as indeed it was; b) argue that the old stories could be repurposed to the new realities, and that that is what poets and writers and artists are for, in wartime, and so they must not be considered superfluous or less than useful; and c) turn the myths she loved to fit the world around her, that had changed.
The astonishing thing is that she pretty much does it. Points a) and b) go together into the first bit, The Walls Do Not Fall Down, and the other two poems are riffings on c). Tribute to the Angels is the one that's most impressive, if you know much about angel-lore, a densely allusive calling on seven great angels whose names are Biblical and whose purposes in the world are-- not. Her Uriel is a terrifying angel of war: when he is the angel of silence, it is the silence between the bombs.
Her language is modernist, pared down, reminds me of Eliot without his occasional attempts at purposeful obfuscation. When she obfuscates it is because she assumes everyone knows the reference (no, we do not all read classical Hebrew, sorry). Her rhythm is strong and never quite predictable, and her sense of rhyme is true. She does not concede to near-rhymes, ever, nor lets the necessity for a rhyme govern the sense of the words. The form and function are as inseparable as they are with any master poet.
In short, this is lovely stuff, this is brilliant, this is the sort of thing that doesn't make it into the fabled edificiary Western bloody Canon because the author was a mostly-lesbian who had her child choosingly out of wedlock and didn't marry Pound; The Canon could maybe forgive one of those attributes, a child out of wedlock by mistake, say, or respectably monogamous lesbianism, but not more than one, and not marrying Pound may have been deadly anyhow. So her work falls in and out of print, making one to mutter bitter things about Twentieth Century Literature, which somehow feels like a monument rather than a collection of artworks, doesn't it. Poet, novelist, essayist, and master of herself: I look forward to reading more of her.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-26 08:18 am (UTC)For example, this is how even the British Film Institute (whom I generally like) writes about their lives:
directed by Kenneth Macpherson, editor of the influential intellectual film journal Close Up (1927–33), the first British journal dedicated to film as a modernist art form . . . Borderline stars the poet H.D. (real name Hilda Doolittle) and Macpherson's wife, writer Winifred Bryher . . . It is also worth noting that H.D. was lesbian, and is thought to have had an affair with Bryher.
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/443504/
(a) No one who knew better called Bryher by anything but her chosen name past 1920 at the latest; I believe she started after a trip to the Isles of Scilly while still at school, with a friend or girlfriend. Especially considering that her given name was Annie Winifred Ellerman, this is not difficult to understand.
(b) There is no thought about it. Bryher and H.D. met in 1918; they were together until H.D.'s death in 1961. When Bryher married Macpherson in 1927, he had already been H.D's lover for a year; she had gotten to know him through one of her girlfriends, with whom he had previously been involved. The pregnancy H.D. chose not to keep in 1928 was his. He and Bryher would remain married until 1947, during which time most of his relationships would be with men. Somewhere early on, they legally adopted H.D.'s daughter, Perdita. Seriously, Screenonline. You're just getting biographical fail all over this quite interesting-sounding movie with Paul Robeson.
(c) Also, it really is not perceptible from this writeup that Borderline (1930) is the only full-length survivor of the avant-garde film collective formed by H.D., Bryher, and Macpherson in 1927—the Pool Group or POOL—and that to attribute its authorship to Macpherson alone is to miss the entire point of the group, which doubled as a publishing house as well as a film studio. H.D.'s poem "Projector" was written for the first issue of Close Up.
In short, yeah. Western Canon, not helping.
(Apologies for the anonymous; it's me. Livejournal is so borked, insert Swedish Chef joke here. I have not even been able to log in via OpenID, because that requires contact with my account—I'm just hoping it hasn't actually been deleted somehow, because that would suck.)
no subject
Date: 2011-08-07 04:54 pm (UTC)Cool! I did not know that.