Collected Poems, 1912-1944 by H. D.

First published: 1983

Type of work: Poetry

Form and Content

H. D.’s Collected Poems, 1912-1944 is the largest single gathering of Hilda Doolittle’s poetry in one volume. It brings together H. D.’s poetry from the first poems shown to Ezra Pound in 1912—definitive of Imagism—through the completion of her World War II Trilogy in 1946, written as a continuation of her analytic work with Sigmund Freud. It thus provides the reader with access to a wide range of H. D.’s poems written over a thirty-year period, allowing the reader to explore in what ways H. D. was the definitive Imagist—and thus in some ways the true initiator of modernist poetics—and how her early concern with Greece, joined with her later interest in psychoanalysis, led finally to the authoritative voice of the first great modern feminist poet—the poet of the visionary Trilogy with which the volume closes.

The collection is divided into four parts, parts 1 and 2 each consisting of a complete earlier publication, The Collected Poems of H. D. (1925) and Red Roses for Bronze (1931), part 3 bringing together a rich selection of “uncollected and unpublished poems (1912-1944),” and part 4 consisting of the wartime Trilogy.

Part 1 contains many of H. D.’s earliest poems, including “Hermes of the Ways,” the poem that Pound signed for her “H. D. Imagiste” when sending it for publication in the January, 1913, issue of Poetry. This was to be the first publication of poetry in a new style: focusing on the “thing,” using no unnecessary word, and written “in sequence of the musical phrase,” not according to a metronomic beat. Literary modernism had begun.

The poems of Sea Garden (1916), Hymen (1921), and Heliodora and Other Poems (1924) are together here with some poems excluded from H. D.’s earlier books and some of her translations. Notable among them is the Orphic meditation “Eurydice,” in which Orpheus’ bride curses him for glancing back—an act of male “arrogance” and “ruthlessness”—and so returning her to the realm of death just as she was about to taste life again.

The volume Red Roses for Bronze makes up part 2 of this collection and includes a translation from the Bacchae of Euripides invoking the sacred, frenzied dance of the maenads and the slaying of Pentheus, desecrator of the (feminine) Mysteries.

Part 3 adds many new poems to the canon of H. D.’s work—some that had appeared previously in magazines, some that existed otherwise only in manuscript. This is the heart of the collection, insofar as it contains the largest amount of previously unpublished H. D. material. It includes, notably, the poems “Amaranth,” “Eros,” and “Envy,” which document H. D.’s sense of her betrayal by her husband Richard Aldington.

Also included is her long poem “The Master,” which describes her relationship with Sigmund Freud, with whom she was in analysis in 1933-1934. “I found measureless truth/ in his words,” she writes; “his command/ was final.” She continues, “I caught the dream/ and rose dreaming,/ and we wrought philosophy on the dream content,/ I was content.” Freud’s words—the key words and phrases of the entire analysis—were these: “every gesture is wisdom . . . nothing is lost”; “I will soon be dead/ I must learn form the young”; and, when an angry H. D. demands of this old man his secret, “we won’t argue about that . . . you are a poet.” Freud in some sense sets H. D. free to prophesy. The poem that follows “The Master” in this collection, “The Poet,” is a tribute to another of H. D.’s long series of male “initiators,” D. H. Lawrence.

Part 4 contains the long poetic sequence Trilogy (published posthumously in one volume in 1973), comprising The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). The Walls Do Not Fall was written as bombs fell on London; it contains apocalyptic war poems, expressing a visionary ecstasy in the heart of war. Tribute to the Angels marks a turning point in H. D.’s visionary life, letting “Psyche, the butterfly,/ out of the cocoon.” The Flowering of the Rod moves toward the revelation of a new wisdom to be born of the female psyche.

Context

H. D. was first perceived as the quintessential Imagist, forever under the shadow of her powerful male mentor, Ezra Pound. More recent criticism sees in her something closer to the true original of Imagism—one whose Imagism, moreover, was acquired naturally, not as the result (as with Pound) of a poetic program.

While H. D. may have started as an Imagist, she moved on under the benign eye and influence of Freud to become a mythographer of the female mystery. In doing so, she repaid Freud’s gift to her with the poet’s insight that true therapy is not limited to the banishment of symptoms but extends to the highest forms of self-expression in the arts—that poetry and healing, in their beginnings, are not divided. H. D.’s work, accordingly, has influenced students of Freud as well as her fellow poets—Judy Grahn being among those who have continued her exploration of feminine myth.

Bibliography

Chisholm, Dianne. H. D.’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Extended study of H. D.’s later poetry—of which Trilogy is the centerpiece—in the light of her reading of (and analysis with) Freud. Some knowledge of standard Freudian terminology (such as “screen memory”) helps. Includes extensive notes, bibliography, and index.

Dickie, Margaret. “Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernism.” In The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. A sensitive essay, offering an extended treatment of H. D., Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. Dickie views them as figures who were rendered marginal by the assumptions of their male colleagues in literary modernism and who had to wait almost a century for the recognition they deserve and the readers who would cherish them, because they were “at least that far ahead of their times.”

Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. An excellent biography of H. D., tracing the many strands that, woven together, constitute the complex life of a woman whose work was always autobiographical, always rooted in the concrete event as it flowered in symbolic and mythic thought. With bibliography and index.

H. D. Tribute to Freud. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1974. H. D.’s own account of her psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud provides an entrance into the understanding of her life and mode of work, besides being a fascinating account of both Freud and psychoanalysis. Widely recommended as the first book of H.D. to read. With an appendix of letters from Freud to H. D.

Robinson, Janice, H. D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Another excellent biography of H. D., somewhat more introspective and psychoanalytically conceived than Guest’s. Contains notes, a bibliography, and an index.