The H.D. Book (7 page)

The poem had something to do with keeping open and unfulfilled the urgencies of life. Men hurried to satisfy ends in things, pushed their minds to make advances, right answers, accomplishments, early maturations. They contrived careers that they fully filled. They grew round and fat upon the bough in the heat that kept them where they were, and they prayed that they not fall from their success, that no wind come to break them loose.

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Yet this very poem “Heat,” I came to learn, stood in the fixed ideas of literary history as an example of a kind of early perfectionism. As it had appeared first, in
Some Imagist Poets
of 1915, it had been not a poem in itself, as anthologists came to present it, but the second part of the poem “Garden.” It was preceded then by the statement of another image, a
rose seen as if cut in rock, and by the poet’s counterstatement, “If I could break you . . . if I could stir”:

You are clear
O rose, cut in rock,
hard as the descent of hail.

I could scrape the colour
from the petals
like spilt dye from a rock.

If I could break you
I could break a tree.

If I could stir
I could break a tree—
I could break you.

The imagist thing in the poem, the hard “cut in rock” rose and the thick heat, contained the suggestion of a tense suspended awareness that was to be an ideal of modern sensibility in the second decade of the century and to find its expression in works of that generation in the nineteen-twenties. This experience hung upon its bough, and these poems were like moments brought to and kept in a perfection, roses, fruits or cut stones, valued for their implied discrimination. But the poet’s dramatic statement of the wish to be freed from this keep of the perfect moment was not imagist, was romantic, and marred the example that readers searching for H.D. the Imagist sought in the poem. The poems most anthologists have taken, the poems that have been selected to label H.D., are few and were written in the brief period between 1912 and 1916. Even these have been mis-taken, removed from the total context of poetic experience to which they belong, for the work of these years included also “The Shrine” and “The Gift,” which are not imagist but dramatic in intent, and poems like “Cities” or “The Tribute,” which plead the cause of Beauty against the squalor of commerce or lament the death of young men in the war. So too, the second section of the poem “Garden” has been set apart from its original intent, to become exemplary of clarity, finish, hardness—self-containment, and to stand not as part of H.D.’s creative consciousness
but as an example of Imagism. The poem “Heat” now, presented by the anthologist’s picture, appears to have been written in order to capture the very image of stasis of heat and fruit that the poet longs to be shattered. But when we go back of the anthology establishment to contemporary reviews of H.D.’s
Collected Poems
in 1925, we find that Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Edward Sapir—or, earlier, John Gould Fletcher, reviewing the volume
Sea Garden
in 1917—see her work as a whole, having its vital import beyond and even outside of the Imagist program.

It was Ezra Pound who had first scratched that word at the end of a manuscript of hers—
“H.D. Imagiste.”
Later he was to say that he had started the Imagist idea to launch the poetry of H.D. In the directives Pound drew up—the credo of 1912—the “A Few Don’ts” of 1913, included again in “A Retrospect” of 1917—the new idea of the image goes along with a new idea of poetic form, of composing in the sequence of the musical phrase, and with another idea of—“economy,” he calls it—purification of the poem. The waste of tone color and ornament is to be cleared away; abstraction, whatever diffuse suggestion, must go. It is an imperative toward perfection that haunts the aesthetic propositions of Imagism.

So too, in Pound’s idea of the image itself the perfectionist drive appears, for, though the image Pound proposes is “an intellectual and emotional complex,” the complex does not proliferate but is realized “in an instant of time.” Here, though the perfect and the complex would seem to be of different orders, Pound projects the aesthetic, even moral, suggestion of a perfected experience or epiphany: “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” They were working toward an intensity, a concentration of poetic force. Pound had brooded from a poem of thirty lines, he tells us, striving to render an emotion that had arisen in the sight of beautiful faces seen crowded in the Paris Metro:

Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following
hokku
-like sentence:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

For Pound, H.D. in certain poems had realized the ideal of purity demanded; her poetic line pruned and tried toward the hardness of an utter economy exemplified “craftsmanship,” and in the address of her poems she praised the beauty of flowers, trees, stones, or grains of sand, that had been tried by the elements. She had perfected her name Hilda Doolittle too, leaving the bare initials, the essential signature that might be cut in stone. It was as Ezra Pound wanted her. That first Imagist poem, she tells us, after his reading, had been “now slashed with his creative pencil, ‘cut this out, shorten this line’.” And Pound was the first to write, when the poems of H.D.’s Lawrencian period began to appear in
The Egoist
in 1917—“The God,” “Adonis,” “Pygmalion,” “Eurydice”—that she had “spoiled the ‘few but perfect’ positions which she might have held on to.”

The definition of the image in the talk of Pound, H.D., and Aldington, in the tearoom of the British Museum in 1912, had led to the declarations of a literary movement, and it gave an advertising label to the work of new poems appearing in
The Egoist,
where Richard Aldington had become an editor in 1913, and in the United States in
Poetry,
where Harriet Monroe might be responsive, it was hoped, to Pound’s advice. After Pound’s anthology presenting the group,
Des Imagistes
of 1914, what had been a working program in poetry was fully launched as a literary fashion, and the idea of H.D.’s being the most perfect craftsman of the new Perfecti who had received that
consolamentum,
the “one image in a lifetime,” was to be a central tenet. The original proposition of the Image had harkened back to intellectual and emotional overtones of the Symbolist era even as it moved forward toward a functionalism that was in the Modernist aesthetic to be anti-Symbolist. Like Symbolism, Pound’s Imagism had been conceived as a cult of the elect in art. But with the Imagist anthologies of 1915, 1916, and 1917, edited by Amy Lowell, H.D., and Aldington, the Imagist movement became generalized and popularized. The ideas of image, composition by musical phrase, and verbal economy were let go into the lowest common denominators of impressionism,
vers libre,
and everyday speech. By 1937, twenty-five years after the birth of Imagism, all reference to the word
image,
once defined as presenting an intellectual and emotional
complex, had been dissipated, and the term had come to indicate whatever in a poem brought a picture to the mind of the reader.

It was not only in “Amygism,” as Pound dubbed the heretical popularization, that the first character of the Image as epiphany was lost, for Pound himself was to take as his project the work of small m modernists whose use of the image was profoundly anti-Imagist. For T. E. Hulme, whose work had already been published by Pound at the end of the volume
Ripostes
in 1912, and often in Eliot’s poems, the image had not been the nexus of an experience but the opportunity of an expression, of a striking figure in the author’s rhetoric. Whatever else they were, the images—in Hulme’s poem “Autumn,” the ruddy moon that may be like a red-faced farmer peering over a hedge, or in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the evening that may be like a patient etherized upon a table—are not mythopoeic in their operation or intent, not deepening our sense of the reality of moon or of evening, but present extension of their author’s wit, personal conceits. In the work of Amy Lowell, the image was imitative of sensory appearances informed by mood, a kind of literary impressionism. The persuasive personal conceit and the sensual personal impression were what most critics and readers readily accepted as the range of the image.

The modern sensibilities of Hulme, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis excited Pound, and he sought to identify his work with theirs, but as Lewis saw in
Time and Western Man,
Pound was “A Man in Love with the Past,” and for all his efforts to make of
The Cantos
a dynamic ideogram,
The Cantos
remain a post-Symbolist work. For Pound, as for H.D., as for Lawrence or for Williams, the image was not an invention but a numinous event in language, a showing forth of a commanding Reality in the passing personal real. Like James Joyce, they sought epiphanies. “Image,” for Pound, was carefully so set off by quotation marks and spelled with the capital. Although he would disarm us with his reference to “the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart” (the reference to Dr. Bernard Hart, Fellow of University College, London, perhaps to exorcise the thought of Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, when speaking of the term
complex
), there is, for those readers who are wary of the context of Pound’s thought
immersed as it is in the tradition of Poetry and the Spirit of Romance, a beckoning suggestion in the “intellectual and emotional complex” of that Intellect in which man comes close to the Creative Intent, of the
“Et omniformis omnis intellectus est”
from Psellos, which remains from the beginning thematic in
The Cantos,
or of that “apprehension by means of the potential intellect,” which Dante tells us is Man’s true mode of being. “Did this ‘close ring,’ this aristocracy of emotion,” the youthful Pound writes in the essay “Psychology and Troubadours,” “evolve, out of its half memories of Hellenistic mysteries, a cult—a cult stricter, or more subtle, than that of the celibate ascetics, a cult for the purgation of the soul . . . ?” The “complex” then was a node involving not only the psyche, as that term is used by modern psychologists, but the soul, as that term is used by esoteric schools. So too, the quotation marks and the capitalization, setting the word “Image” apart, carried for the knowing reader the sense that the word had a special meaning beyond the apparent. “Image” and “Intellect” in the framework of Gnostic and neo-Platonic doctrines that haunt Pound’s cantos to the last are terms of a Reality that is cosmic and spiritual; they are terms of a visionary realism.

Reviewing H.D.’s volume
Sea Garden,
John Gould Fletcher, a fellow Imagist, wrote:

It is really about the soul, or the primal intelligence, or the
Nous,
or whatever we choose to call that link that binds us to the unseen and uncreated. . . . To penetrate H.D.’s inner meaning, it is only necessary that we approach her poetry with an open and responsive mind. . . . But this state of mind, receptive, quiescent, is also necessary if we are to understand Plotinus, or Dionysius the Areopagite, or Paracelsus, or Behmen, or Swedenborg, or Blake.

That Image and Intellect may have been in the first phase of Imagism charged with more than a literary meaning begins to be clear.

Pound in his study of Dante and in his conversations and readings with Yeats had come into what was to be a lifelong admiration of Iamblichus and Proclus, late neo-Platonists, in whose imaginations the Image had taken on powers of person and angelic being. Fletcher’s
early review of H.D. would indicate that for others too in the Imagist circle—the “School of Images” Pound calls it in his “Prefatory Note” to Hulme’s poems—for H.D. then, and for some contemporary readers of H.D.’s work, the image of the Imagists was associated with the Image, with Eidolon and Idea as they appear in Hellenistic and again in late Medieval and Renaissance speculation. “One must consider that the types which joined these cults survived, in Provence,” Pound writes in “Psychology and Troubadours”: “and survive, today—priests, maenads, and the rest—though there is in our society no provision for them.”

The very movement of the line might be a magic then, theurgic in its intent, in which the Image was specially evoked. The line was to be expressive—that was the demand of the modern aesthetic, and Pound and H.D. were acutely sensitive to the style that the age demanded; but it was also to be efficacious—it was not to express the Image but to call up its Presence, to cause it to happen. We may read H.D.’s proposal in the
Imagist Anthology
of 1915 with a gathering suspicion: “A new cadence means a new idea” takes on a special meaning when the word
idea
is colored by the poetic lore of neo-Platonic theurgy. Pound’s injunction “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase” may not only be a departure from literary conventions but a conversion to heresies of a spiritual order. There was no thing that was not, given the proper instant in time and intent in vision, Image. There was no image that was not, properly rendered, the nexus of divine and elemental orders in the human world. Anguish and ecstasy gave presence to, and were aroused by a presence in, the natural world. Rocks and sea, thunderous surfs, gardens and orchards actually exposed the soul to the spiritual presence, flooded it with the presence—all but unbearably—and yet, at the same time, sheltered it within the presence.

“To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation”—this second commandment of Pound’s Imagist manifesto was essential in the high art that lay back of the famous rapture of H.D.’s early work, the root in practice of her lyric genius. The line of her verse grew taut, tempered to keep an edge naked in experience, tense to provide a mode in which reverberations of these presences might be heard. The image and the voice or dramatic mask provided the nexus
of a mystery in Poetry corresponding to the outer and inner worlds in which the poetess, now a priestess in the mysteries of the language, worked toward higher and finer modes of participation in a mystery in Life Itself.