h.d and Hellenism

8/3/2019 h.d and Hellenism

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"Keen edged heterodoxy . . . surprising strangeness" [ Eileen

Gregory.H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines. London: Cambridge

University Press, 1997. ]

In this remarkably clear and gracious book, the H.D. scholar Eileen

Gregory argues for a new understanding of H.D.'s hellenism, one thatwould place H.D.'s complex intertextuality of classical allusions and

references within the context of competing "fictions of classicism"swirling around the literary communities of the early 20th century.

The stakes were high, involving nothing less than the "direct

transmission" of inheritance for what in Western Anglo American and

European literary traditions often stood in for the highest examples ofvalor, virtue and moral character. "H.D.," Gregory writes, "certainly

knew what she was up against in entering, even as an amateur, the

domains of traditional classicism . . . . She fully understood the violent

discontinuities within classical transmission, coming in part from thepolitical and religious biases: the gradual removal, even deliberate

destruction, of manuscripts (lyric/erotic poetry) thought to be

indecent or heretical, the haunting loss of all but a few poems and

fragments from what appears to have been a vital female poetictradition." Against the guardians of the "pure" transmission, Gregory

argues, H.D. sought a more eclectic body of information from the

devalued Alexandrian line, with its inclusions of hermeticism,

mystery religions, ambiguous sexual identity and homosexual desirewell suited to elevating the female figure as the source of spiritual

energy and erotic presence and desire.

Again, Gregory: "As H.D. consciously shaped her role in the survivalof the classics, however, she imagined it as clearly marginal to the life

of letters as traditionally conceived and practiced, even by her fellow

imagist rebels, with their scorn for traditional scholarship. She saw

her role in terms of a subversive, erotic and visionary endeavorfundamentally challenging the assumptions of classical transmission;

or, in [Walter] Pater's terms, she saw herself speaking from the

"centrifugal" margins, against the Germanic dominance of classical

learning." In the midst of this academic and literary war, H.D.developed her own specific hellenic tradition across the boundaries of

multiple sources to find a use for the materials quite unlike any one

else's. The great gift of Gregory's book is that now, with a scholar's

help, we are finally able to see the full range of her texts and, throughGregory's guidance, to begin to understand the felt intensity of these

references, particularly in the early lyric work ofSea Garden, and in


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the later refinement of understandings in Helen in Egypt. The

founding editor of the H.D. Newsletter in the mid 1980's as well as a

full professor of classics at the University of Dallas, Eileen Gregory

takes on the challenge of revising our understandings of H.D.'s workwith an enormous command of classical material matched with a

writer's attention to the subtleties of H.D.'s poetic line. "Untilrecently," Gregory writes, "critics have dismissed the classical

allusiveness in her poem as trivial or contrived, and the criticalclimate has not existed in which her lyricism or her hellenism could be

taken very seriously." Weaving a web of multiple texts that stand

outside the "whitened marble" of traditional classicism, Gregory uses

sources as diverse as William Pater, Jonathan Culler, Robert Duncanand Euripides as critical tools to approach more closely the

intertextuality and hence, poetic intelligence, underlying H.D.'s work.

While the pioneering scholarship of Susan Stanford Friedman has

gone a long way in uncovering the "left handed" sense of hermeticand esoteric traditions which influenced H.D.'s entire body of work,

no other critic of H.D., except perhaps the poet Robert Duncan in his

legendary The H.D. Book or, later, the poet Diane Di Prima in her

privately printed The Mysteries of Vision (1988), has made the

connection between the early lyric and the harsh personal demands of

the hermetic traditions which were part of the more diverse anderotically charged Alexandrian classical transmission. Understanding

poetic forms of hellenic inheritance as inside afelt experience of

vision, H.D. placed her work outside an academic commodity cultureand inside a "gift economy" in a circulation of exchange. Her

inheritance, then, was not a "bartering of word for word before a

tribunal of literary guardians" but an act of creative response and

"reciprocation" as "tribute to the original gift": a writing that couldbear the weight of vision.

This insight of the oracular impulse of H.D.'s early lyric leads Gregory

toward what might be the most important contribution of this book toH.D. scholarship as Gregory re reads the early poetry through an

understanding of voice which re casts the task of H.D.'s lyric as that of

creating and sustaining immediate presence. Gregory takes seriously

"as its own quest" that which is "often subsumed in another guise" ofbiographic information, and, in so doing, complicates our previous

critical understandings of H.D.'s strategy of personally inflected

poetic "masks" by bringing her project, particularly in Sea Garden, into

a long line of transcendent lyric associations. Reading JonathanCuller's notions of the uses of the lyric voice against her own readings


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of the early work, Gregory argues that H.D.'s lyric voice occupies the

"oblique and marginal" territory of a poet whose own poems might

(as Gregory describes the "fully engaged hermetic mage") respond to

and generate "the animation of the spiritual in things . . . throughsense and bodily desire." In this remarkable chapter, Gregory deepens

our understanding of H.D.'s work as a "deliberate affiliation with awide and diverse set of lyric predecessor and contemporaries, among

which [her work] makes its own very large claims for poetic presencethrough voice" that is, for the poem's power to actually "make

something happen." In H.D.'s lyric, Gregory writes, the tradition of

oracular and visionary poetry marries "scientific precision . . .

eroticism, and . . . mystical clairvoyance" to enter the hidden matrix ofthe creative act, with its dark, occluded shadows of absence and self

doubt as well as its shining white of crystal. Whatever sparseness of

voice is there, Gregory implies, is there in part because of the poet's

necessity to make of the larger project of writing its own vehicle ofenactment, and to follow, therefore, the demands of the craft. This

interpretation is a long way from the "disembodiment,

depersonalization, repression, flight [and] stasis" of the pure

"crystalline" line with which the poems of H.D.'s Sea Garden are often

associated. "H.D.'s classicism first attracted me to the study of her

writing," Gregory writes, "but her keen edged heterodoxy,rebelliousness, and surprising strangeness have sustained my

fascination and compelled my labor." In situating this "surprising

strangeness" and "rebelliousness" within new readings, Gregory

suggests H.D.'s work as "an antinomian move against the stilledbodies of the Gods" the lifeless perfection of classicism whose anti -presence constituted the return to cultural traditions of "purity" that

so engaged Pound and Eliot. The reference to antinomianism is

telling; like the earlier outlaws Ann Hutchinson and Emily Dickinson,H.D. understood her work as outside the traditional readings, either

of source or of interpretation, and therefore fashioned a personal

language which vision alone recovered. H.D.'s early work, long

considered as of lesser value than the later, more discursive narrative

work ofTrilogy orHelen in Egypt, is given new context by which we

can read again works with which we were once familiar.

In the past, we have had precious few sympathetic guides to take usto the select world of classical references in order to begin to read

H.D.'s classical intertextuality in all of its fullness; and now, with

Eileen Gregory's book, we are, quite simply, allowed entrance.

Listening to the poets and theoreticians but never obscuring her


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arguments with pseudo linguistics of any kind, Gregory offers a

sophisticated and highly learned interpretation for material which

many of us thought we already knew. Her own original thinking on

these matters and her considerable control of scholarly materialspresents in such an engaging prose as to make the reading of this

book an open invitation for others to enter. I wish her as wide andgenerous a readership as this book deserves.

Eileen O Malley Callahan

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h.d and Hellenism