H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

מאמר זה מציג אסופה ייחודית של ממוארים שנכתבו על ידי מטופליו של פרויד. אציג שלושה ממוארים מתוך האסופה ואתמקד בהיבט מסוים המופיע בהם: התמקדותם בפרידה מהפסיכואנליזה ומפרויד כאנליטיקאי. הנרטיבים של פרידה המוצעים בממוארים מספקים לנו נקודת מבט חדשנית על התהליך האנליטי, ומאירים את תהליך הסיום של האנליזה כתהליך מרכזי ומתמשך, בשונה מפרויד, אשר לא נטה להקדיש לסיומי טיפול תשומת לב רבה. הממואר הראשון נכתב על ידי הפסיכואנליטיקאי אברם קרדינר (Kardiner 1977), השני על ידי סרגיי פנקייב הידוע בכינויו "איש הזאבים" (Gardiner 1971a) והשלישי על ידי המשוררת הילדה דוליטל המכונה ה"ד (H.D. 1974). שלושת הנרטיבים יוצאי דופן אלה מוצגים במאמר הנוכחי כמלאכת תרגום פסיכואנליטית - ספרותית. עבודת התרגום מוצגת כמורכבת משלושה אספקטים: הבניית העבר במסגרת עבודת הזיכרון, פירוש השאריות המודעות של יחסי ההעברה במסגרת עבודת האבל, ופענוח בדיעבד של המסרים האניגמטיים מצדו של פרויד כדמות סמכות. ייצוג כתיבתו של האנליזנט כעבודת תרגום מאיר את הפוטנציאל העשיר הטמון בהכרה בממוארים של מטופלים כאסופה בעלת ערך של "ספרות מינורית", כשם שניסחו זאת דלז וגואטרי, ביחס לספרות הפסיכואנליטית המוכרת.

This paper argues that the poetics of Ezra Pound and H.D. form the vanishing mediator for the post-1970's literary interpretation of Sappho within Anglo-American classics. It thereby inverts Hugh Kenner's canonical interpretation of the presence of Sappho in Pound's work of the 1910's to argue that "fragmentation," as an aesthetic in provocative excess of the philological record, is not classical in any sense but rather a modernist ideology of form.

With my fingers too, rather than with my eyes, I read these poems. Ionic volutes-delicate and ringed-white shells with the inner side of pearl-indented cup with the chiseling as fine as the pattern of the under-leaf lining of the wine itself … all this-more and much more-and to concentrate my senses, struggling now with faint, exotic perfumes, pungent and stimulating, not quite familiar, with colours, rose and the violet of the rainbow, I close my eyes and with my fingers like one blind would find my way about this poetry.

This article elaborates key aspects of the imagist poetry of twentieth century American poets E. Pound, A. Lowell and H. Doolittle. Twentieth century Imagism belongs to a literary movement in American modern era that is characterized by a tendency to break from the past of traditional literary styles, to a movement that reflects the simplicity, clarity and precision of reflective images. It covers a period from imagism to symbolism, a period of free expression, direct topics as well as images as an exact description. The study remains with highest relevance, despite that there is a wide range of articles, papers, analysis and books about American studies, yet it is a gap in specific topics and authors.

Il prologo contiene un discorso diretto (1-2) e una sphragis (3), come l'Ode ad Afrodite di Saffo. Ma in Nosside il discorso è della poetessa, non della dea: "Questo dice Nosside". La "firma" sta fuori del discorso diretto, come nel proemio della Teogonia di Esiodo (22 J Hsiv odon), ma al nominativo, non all'accusativo. Il nominativo è anche in VII 718, 4, il genitivo in VI 265, 4. Nella proemiale Ode ad Afrodite, Saffo (1, 20 Voigt Yav pf!) preferiva invece il vocativo, che riuserà altre volte, nei frr. 94, 5 e 133, 2 e 65, 5 Voigt, con la dichiarazione d'amore della dea: "O Saffo, ti amo". La tipologia della "firma" è quella tipica degli esordi epistolari e di logoi storici, filosofici e persino giambici: "Ecateo di Mileto così dice, muqei' tai" (fr. 1 Jacoby); "Alcmeone di Crotone, figlio di Pirito, queste cose disse, tav de e[ lexe, a Brotino e a Leone e a Batillo" (fr. 1 Diels-Kranz ); "Susarione dice queste cose" (fr. giamb., II, p. 167 West 2 ). L'onore della menzione onomastica è riservato alla poetessa e alla sua divina madrina: Nossiv " e Kuv pri". I due nomi nello stesso verso rendono più esemplare l'anonimato della donna esclusa dall'amore della dea. Allo stesso modo FRANCESCO DE MARTINO 8 nosa0.qxp 14/09/2006 15:17 PAEgina 8

This thesis argues that H.D.'s creativity originates in a flight from reality. Hilda Doolittle's adoption of her initials is interpreted as a sign of the writer's rejection of any identity located in the shared reality of the historical and the quotidian. From childhood her personality presented itself to her as a duality; detaching herself from the merely visible and material world, H.D. created an intense inner life which asserted itself in the dimension of artistic realization. It is argued that paradoxically the unevenness and discontinuity that characterize H.D.’s work derive from the same roots as her artistic originality and power: in her "split dual personality" which posited reality in the disembodied self. H.D. discovered in ancient Greece a metaphor and a direction for her own inner world. However her Imagist poems are not imitative but genuinely original: H.D. invented a new reality which she projected as a world devoid of all traces of human presence. H.D.'s subsequent shift of interest towards auto¬biographical prose is interpreted as a response to the threatened disintegration of her identity after World War I. The formlessness and repetition of much of H.D.’s prose is thus attributed to the exacerbation of the writer’s dichotomy of being. However, in some of her prose works H.D. succeeded in transfiguring the autobiographical material through the re invention of reality in the image of her own subjectivity. Seeking new forms for her projection of the self, H.D. turned increasingly towards the occult which she understood as the science of the invisible dimension. She conflated with the occult her discoveries of the cinema as self projection, and psychoanalysis as an instrument of knowledge of the inner being. It is argued that these interests exacerbated the solipsism inherent in H.D.'s rejection of external reality. With the exception of the war Trilogy, H.D.'s work becomes locked in private meanings which render it increasingly inaccessible to the reader. It is argued that after her mental breakdown in 1946, H.D. never recovered her vitality and originality as an artist. The space that this thesis devotes to the life of H.D. does not intend to justify her work by her life, but to signify that the literary message cannot be isolated from the circumstances in which the process of creation takes place. Thus H.D.'s flight from reality is not judged from an existential point of view as a diminution of being, since it is out of her "split dual personality" that H.D. emerges as a genuinely creative and original artist.

Author:  Belinda Jane McKay
College:  Lady Margaret Hall
Degree:  D. Phil.
Term of submission: Trinity, 1985

This is my Italian Master's Degree Thesis in American Literature and translation in Italian.
IF YOU FIND IT INTERESTING, PLEASE GIVE ME A FEEDBACK or A RECOGNITION ON YOUR FOOTNOTE :)

Stesichorus of Sicily is the first poet that revisits the myth of Helen of Troy, declaring that the real Helen had been transported to Egypt. Hilda Doolittle, as a mythmaking modernist poet, returns to the roots of traditional buildings of the woman in the Homeric figure of Helen of Troy, stereotyped embodiment of all women,  re-reading Stesichorus and re-writing the Greek myth. She questioned the binary value of the femme fatale and the angelic woman she has ever represented, seeing it as a hieroglyph to be deciphered and discussing the patriarchal value attributed to her.

H.D.'s rewriting of Circe betrays many influences: besides Homer, Sappho’s lyric poetry and the Victorian reception of Greek mythology are at work. Despite the prominence of the Greek models in H.D's poetics, her "Circe" seems nonetheless reminiscent of the Latin reshaping of the Homeric character, especially Virgil’s passage in Aeneid (7.10-24) and Ovid’s Remedia amoris 263-90. However, by endowing Circe with her authorial voice, H.D. makes the figure of the goddess something quite different from the powerless lover of Ovid’s poem. It is not out of weakness that she is willing to renounce her extraordinary magic powers in order to have her lover back: it is a choice that she makes according to a different – anti-epic and non androcentric – set of priorities.

This paper compares George Herbert’s imagery with the aesthetic of the early twentieth-century Imagists, whose tenets still dominate English-language poetry. Both the Metaphysicals and the Imagists constituted watershed moments in Anglophone poetry. But while Imagism, like much modernism, eschews rhetoric as didactic, Herbert is unashamedly pedagogical and catechistical, within a complex intellectual tradition of Reformed theology and medieval allegory. Herbertian images are symbolic and intended to startle the reader into recognition, where the modernist image is objectivist and aims to startle the reader into new perspective. Modernist Imagism is religious despite itself, inclining both to paganism and to the sensuous, and to a Romantic metaphysic, as seen in lyrics by poets ranging from H.D., Richard Aldington, and Ezra Pound to William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov. Yet Herbert’s imagery has more claim to Pound’s definition of the image as an “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

This article presents a unique collection of narratives of separation – unique because the separation here is from psychoanalysis and from Freud as analyst. These narratives were published as part of memoirs written about Freud by three of his patients. Their narratives of separation give us an innovative point of view on the psychoanalytic process, in particular with respect to the importance they place on the termination phase of the analysis at a time when Freud himself had not given it much consideration. The three autobiographical texts are Abram Kardiner's memoir (1977); the memoir of Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man (Gardiner, 1971a); and 'Tribute to Freud', by the poet H.D. (1974). These three distinguished narratives are discussed here as works of translation, as understood by Walter Benjamin (1968 [1955]), Paul Ricoeur (2006 [2004]), and Jean Laplanche (1999 [1992]). They express translation under three aspects: reconstruction of the past (the work of memory), interpreting the conscious residues of the transference (the work of mourning), and, as a deferred action, deciphering the enigmatic messages received from Freud as the parental figure. This representation of the analy-sand's writing suggests that the separation from analysis is an endless work of translation within the endless process of deciphering the unconscious.

Strange as it may sound, the symbol par excellence of Corfu,
one of the most photographed places in Greece, the Pontikonisi
(Mouse Island) has not been studied historically: not even one
monograph highlights the symbolism and the imaginary all
around it. In fact we do not know anything about it! Although, it
has influenced arts in a unique way.
The presentation utilizes the unique cultural background of
Corfu and through the analysis of the picturesque island outlines
a unique history of the relationship of man and the natural
environment: starting from the mythical narrative about the
petrified ship of Odysseus, the esoteric aspects of his visit in the
island of Feakes and the interpretation of the lone visits of
Queen Elizabeth are combined with the famous work «Island
of the Dead», of symbolist Arnold Böcklin, and two other
inspired works: the Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem and the
American horror b- movie (1945) with Boris Karloff. Besides
these, will be presented the «unknown» psychedelic,
transcendental and metaphysical avant-garde story of the
American poet Hilda Doolittle with the title «Pontikonisi»
(Mouse Island) written in 1932 after a visit to Corfu. The poet
was in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna during
1933-1934 and expressed her Corfu experience. Her visions also
used during the theoretical and applied pioneering involvement
with the cinema (1930’s film Borderline).

A famous tourist attraction, known mainly only for its natural
beauty, is studied as self transcendence limit. It is like the Room
in the Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker: it fulfills not just the
wishes of a visitor, but the true unconscious desires of those that
come in.

Paris at the turn of the twentieth century was a creative hub for writers and artists who were drawn to the city for the freedom of expression fostered there. There were many public spaces in modernist Paris where they gathered, such as the well-known cafés on the Boulevard Saint- Germain. But there were also public spaces in private settings – the famous salons conducted by women in their homes, such as those of Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney. These modernist salons followed in the tradition established in seventeenth-century Paris in salons such as those held by Italian-born Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. For although the Marquise received her guests reclined on a lit de repos in the private sanctum of her bed-sitting room, the chambre bleue, the connections made and conversations had were on public matters both cultural and political. It was from these at once both public and private social gatherings that the literary genre of the roman à clef first developed. It was later taken up for its particular characteristics as a form of discursive fiction and lifewriting by the women who frequented early twentieth-century salons. The discrete – and discreet – circles of the modernist salons were a pivotal social space where non-conforming sexual subjectivities were enacted or performed, relationships formed and broken, artistic ideas proposed. When they wrote about their lives, the roman à clef and its coded conventions presented itself as the ideal genre.

Rhetoric of modern literature has perceived immense turns since World War I, including the blurred space between literary genres and elimination of the distinctive elements of each genre as an enclosed literary entity. This paper deals with modern movements of poetry concurrent to the break of World War I, such as Imagism, an Anglo-American movement and Acmeism, a Russian movement. Through a scrupulous study of Hilda Doolittle's and Anna Akhmatova's poetry, rhetoric of war poetry is demonstrated comprising narratives, cinematic devises and myths interwoven with verses.

Analyzing Freud presents select correspondence between Sigmund Freud and modernist visionary poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), her partner-patron Bryher (Winnifred Ellerman), and their circle of artists, psychoanalysts, and psychoanalytic enthusiasts. Susan Stanford Friedman, an accomplished modernist and feminist scholar, has written two books on HD: Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D.

Introduction



My dissertation investigates the relationship between experimental writing, bodies, and ecology in the work of modernist women writers. Specifically, I propose that the stylistic experiments of Gertrude Stein, H.D., and Virginia Woolf are inseparable from these authors' theorizations on the body and material environments. They examine how questions of language and the body are ecologically inflected. By "ecology," I do not simply refer to traditional representations of "green ecologies" that explore the human agent's place within balanced ecosystems consisting of plants and animals. Ecocritical readings of these modernist writers' works typically promote Stein's, H.D.'s, and Woolf's interest in restoring harmonious environments by emphasizing a return to serene and stable environments. As a result, the nonhuman world is cast as a pastoral, romantic, or distinctly feminine space of tranquility and restoration. In contrast, I examine precarious environments of which the body is not simply an integral component but indiscernible from the material composition of the nonhuman world. My dissertation builds upon but fundamentally reconceptualises a standard account of feminist modernisms' return to the body in light of the recent turn in both modernist scholarship and feminist studies towards ecocritical models of reading. My critique aligns with emerging conversations on the trans-corporeal body and agential materialism. Both Stacy Alaimo and Karen Barad reconsider how the body, materiality, and discursive processes are bound up in a material recreation of the world. These ideas are part of a larger conversation on the "narratives of matter" investigated by new material ecocriticism. I argue that as Stein, H.D., and Woolf examine the tension between the nonhuman world and socially constructed ideas of what is "natural," they suggest that nature is not a restorative space separate from cultural locales, but an unpredictable, volatile force central to their artistic projects. This rethinking of reductive readings of nature reveals how women writers and literary modernism move beyond discussions that focus on linguistic, historical, and cultural reconstructions of the self and the world, and instead considers how these discussions are imbricated in the ongoing performance of human and nonhuman matter.

What might planetary modernisms mean if we incorporate
non-human along with human dimensions of modernity? The essay
challenges the prevailing anthropocentrism of modernist studies by
focusing on the radical scaling of spacetime in selected women’s
writing and art as they engage with the new cosmology, quantum
physics, materialism, ethics of their times. Spotlighting Woolf, H.D.,
and Hilma af Klint (early twentieth century), and Alicja Kwade and
Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner (twenty-first century), the essay draws on
the new time and archipelagic studies to examine the agencies
of the non-human and human amidst war, colonialism, capitalism,
militarism, and environmental destruction. Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s
Marshallese poems bring into sharp focus the ecologically inflected
planetarity and politics of the other artists and writers.
KEYWORDS
Planetary modernism;
feminism; new materialism;
cosmology; archipelagic studies

Beauty has many contradictory associations, from ephemerality to permanence, the natural to the artificial. When we attempt to locate the beautiful, notions of ‘conventional’ beauty often conflict with individual assessments of what is beautiful. We are told that beauty is in the eye of the beholder(s), but is beauty only ever a perception, or can it be an intrinsic quality of objects and people? Is it possible to define the nature of the aesthetic experience? Beauty may trigger philosophical or spiritual contemplation, but it can also evoke possessiveness and lust. Historically, beauty has been admired as virtuous and feared as dangerous. Do judgements about beauty do a disservice to their object, or do they elevate it?

H.D.'s interest in spiritualism is intimately described in The Sword Went Out to Sea (2007) (hereafter referred to as Sword) and Majic Ring (2009), two semi-autobiographical accounts, told by H.D.'s alter ego, Delia Alton. The books describe the narrator's attendance at séances as well as visions of her past lives. Through the creation of a fictional world that allows dichotomies to be overcome and women's voices to be heard, H.D. uses these two novels to present a way of working through both the emotional turmoil of otherworldly experiences and the mental strain brought on by war. In this paper, I aim to show how H.D.'s texts bring forward spiritualism as a route to female emancipation and self-realisation. In order to do this, I will look specifically at two of H.D.'s narratological tools that emerge in the novels. Firstly, the use of repetition will be considered, both as a way of highlighting certain episodes and as a device for re-writing the story (or stories) continuously. Secondly, shifts between first and third person narration will be looked at, as the mode of narration in Majic Ring and Sword changes at intervals. The narrative voice, which belongs to Delia, takes on both first and third person narration. Further on, it will be argued that this is a way for Delia to move out of herself and feel part of a greater context and historical continuity. The novels, written in 1946-47 and 1943-44 respectively, are filled with events and persons that have real counterparts in the life of H.D.; the author herself even wrote a 'key' in a letter to Norman Holmes Pearson in which she identified the characters in Sword (Sword xliii).

“Do not touch me”, Frau Emmy warns Freud in 1889. “Do not touch”, Freud echoes in 1933. This time, he is referring to his pet chow, Yofi, warning H.D. that “she snaps – she is very difficult with strangers”. Examining the prohibition in light of work by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, this article charts the withdrawal that always interrupts touch. Despite Freud’s taboo, however, H.D.’s writing seeks to make contact in strange and unnerving ways. Developing Julia Kristeva’s account of the semiotic, this paper proposes a literature of touch. Reading H.D.’s poems, alongside Tribute to Freud, and her letters, the author demonstrates that H.D.s poetics are always haunted by the very (im)possibility of contact.

Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), better known by her initials H.D., for the greater part of her prolific life, was concerned about her own life story. She was criticized for repeatedly writing about her own life and pictured as a prisoner of autobiography. However, H.D. was not writing a pure autobiography. When her prose is analysed, it is clear that she preferred to write roman à clef2 rather than autobiography. To understand what was missing in autobiography proper and what parchment H.D.'s modernist roman à clef was written on, I will primarily discuss how autobiography proper has been gendered in Western culture and how this genre is treated within H.D.'s modernist coterie. H.D.'s selection of the roman à clef as a genre did not spring from a strange desire to write her life but was, rather, a deliberate choice serving her own purposes. H.D. used roman à clef 'therapeutically', as a 'passive' measure to create a powerful voice. I will illustrate my thesis by juxtaposing relevant passages in her romans à clef: Asphodel, The Paint it Today and Hermione, as well as contextualizing it by using the psychoanalytic works of Nancy Chodorow on identity formation to argue that women needed a new form of expression. Öz: H.D. kısaltması ile daha iyi tanınan Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961) hayatının büyük bölümünde kendi hayat hikâyesini kaleme almaya çalışmıştır. Yazar sürekli kendi hayatını yazmak ve öz yaşam öyküsünün esareti altında kalmakla suçlanmıştır. Fakat H.D. saf bir öz yaşam hikâyesi yazmamaktadır. Yazıları incelendiğinde öz yaşam öyküsünün yanı sıra roman à clef yazmayı tercih ettiğini görüyoruz. Öz yaşam öyküsü yazmaktaki sorunsalları anlamak için batı kültüründe öz yaşam yazımı nasıl şekillenmiş ve H.D.'nin kendi çevresinde bu yazı türü nasıl değerlendirilmiştiri ele almamız gerekmektedir. H.D.'nin roman à clef tercihi yalnızca kendi hayatını kalem alma arzusundan çıkmamıştır bu yazı türü elde etmek istediği amaçlara onu götürecek bir araçtır aynı zamanda. H.D. roman à clef tarzını terapötik bir şekilde kullanarak güçlü bir ses olarak var olmayı başarmıştır. H.D.'nin bu yazım tekniği sayesinde güçlü bir ses oluğu tezini roman à clef tarzında yazdığı Asphodel, Paint it Today ve Hermione yapıtlarından alıntıların analizi ve Nancy Chodorow'un kimlik üzerine psikanalitik teorisiyle açıklamaya çalışılacaktır.

This paper presents H. D.'s dialogue with Freud on the theme of time and timelessness. Freud presented a conception of time that varied in accordance with the various levels of consciousness. But while linear time is presented in Freud’s writing as an essential part of development and mourning, timelessness has not been fully developed as such. A discussion of Freud’s conception of time is followed by a reading of H. D.’s memoir Tribute to Freud (1974). H. D. offers a series of reminiscences of different periods in her life, with an emphasis on her analysis and on Freud. The reading of the memoir presents an intense and stimulating narrative of the encounter with Freud at the time of analysis and in après-coup. This translation revolves around timelessness as a path into a realm of imagination and fantasy, not sufficiently acknowledged by Freud as such, yet crucial to H. D.’s quest for an innovative poetic voice. The significance and elusiveness of timelessness is discussed using ideas from André Green and Walter Benjamin.

Despite the current preoccupation with globalisation, literary criticism remains heavily focused on national cultures. In the context of Australian literature, comparisons are regularly made with the literatures of other British Commonwealth nations, but surprisingly infrequently with that of Britain's first and most successful colony, the United States. This article explores thematic and cultural connections between the work of American-born modernist poet and novelist H.D. (1886–1961) and the Australian-born postmodern novelist Janette Turner Hospital (born 1942). It suggests that the transnational phenomenon of ecstatic Protestantism, which originated in northern Europe and was disseminated widely around the globe along the channels of commerce and colonisation, has been a key influence in shaping the literary imaginations of these writers. Indeed, Protestantism – far from being a spent or reactive force – continues to generate new forms of modernity as its emphasis on transformation is exported from somewhat inward-looking religious communities into broader cultural domains.

Film theorist/critic David Bordwell once noted that film scholars "know how to make movies mean." Filmmakers, regardless of their receptiveness to critical interpretations of their work, might find some irony in this locus of the meaning-maker's identity. Through their choices, filmmakers are the ones who "make movies mean" in the first place. In my film-in-progress, Penelope's Odyssey, I decided to consciously engage with the post-facto vision of meaning-making. Employing a purposeful approach to film form, limited dialogue, and minimal narrative-driven action, I "make my movie mean" and make viewers' interpretive activity requisite to understanding. Penelope's Odyssey consists of short sections set apart with intertitles that are both precise and elusive (Year One: Settling, Year Ten: Slipping, Year Fifteen: Pushing, etc.). Each section has a distinctive schematic of film technique and visual content, making film form the power source of narrative changes in Penelope's emotional journey over the twenty years of Odysseus' absence. One year employs quick straight cuts, another slow fades to black, another superimposes images with dissolves-establishing a different mood, rhythm, and pace to the passage of time for each year. Penelope's perspective and world view change: from images filling the frame to ones cropped, reduced, and nearly overwhelmed by a black background; from the domestic sphere to scenes in nature; from point-of-view to omniscience. Close-ups connote intimacy-or is that claustrophobia? Long shots, a sense of emotional and physical distancing-or perhaps contemplative ease? By deliberately emphasizing variations of form, I aim viewers' attention at a highly premeditated, mediated, and intentional space, encouraging reflection and meaning-creation. Ambiguity is inherent in this process, and viewers' interpretations may result in alternative narrative conclusions. I made my own meaning out of Penelope's twenty years, and I actively offer the same option to my viewers.

This essay examines the contradictions of Robert Duncan’s 1960s political poetry by way of his reading of the legacy of modernism, notably as expounded in The H.D. Book. Drawing on the work of Daniel Tiffany, the essay first argues that here Duncan constructs a kitsch Ezra Pound to restore the true progressive political potential of Pound’s poetry. Using a largely Freudian methodology, Duncan finds in “kitsch” Pound a vector that opposes his authoritarian fascism. The essay then examines how Poundian poetics operates in Duncan’s poetry written in opposition to the Vietnam War and in support of the Berkeley free speech movement. This work is brought into dialogue with some of the conversations in France following May 1968 and with the slogan “Structures don’t take to the streets.” In both these sites, the question of the problematic relationship between individual political volition and activism, on the one hand, and a bourgeois conception of subjectivity, consciousness, and will, on the other, emerges as crucial.

Merwin wrote of his father that: " until I turned on him physically and defied him, I had been afraid of mine..."  Merwin's poetry began with formal diction and verse form.  As he develops he is freed from form to use a meditative cadence stream of consciousness.

The origins of H.D.’s lifelong fascination with esotericism and her syncretist tendencies of thought lie in her early life in America, but were re-shaped in inter-war Europe through her interests in cinema and psychoanalysis. To give some sense of the role of esotericism in H.D.’s work I focus in this paper on two crucial periods – the early 1900s and the period between the two world wars – before concluding with some brief comments about H.D.’s response, as a writer and student of esotericism, to World War II.

In this paper, I argue that the stylistic experiments of H.D. are inseparable from her articulation of a range of biocentric worldviews that contest and complicate more reductive representations of the environment. Specifically, I examine her rarely consulted contributions to the film journal Close-Up in which she explicates how film's capacity to generate new forms of expression has implications for understanding modernist linguistic practices. She thus challenges commonplace understandings of language by moving beyond its merely representational function to explore its affective dimension. H.D. first grappled with these issues in her manifesto Notes on Thought and Vision, suggesting that questions of the body and language are ecologically inflected. Here, she proposes theories of the body that are similar to Stacey Alaimo's notion of " a trans-corporeal materiality " which promotes " a conception of the body that is neither essentialism, nor genetically determined, not firmly bounded, but rather a body in which social power and material/ geographic agencies intra-act " (63). By placing her manifesto in dialogue with her film reviews, I demonstrate how H.D. undermines depictions of a monolithic environment in favour of permeable environments that are central to her artistic projects. H.D. claims that film inspires a " world consciousness " that discloses the complex interrelationship between individual bodies and shifting geographies. Film thus conjures up a global perspective that results from the individual's fibrous connection to an unpredictable environment. Moreover, film reveals how discursive practices are enmeshed in a mutually dependent system that consists of the sensorial apparatus of bodies, dynamic environments, and energized matter, and so dismisses linear historical, individual, and even evolutionary processes. H.D. pays particular attention to language not as a distinctly human trait, but as a process that affects and is affected by the environment. By using HERmione as a case study, I demonstrate how H.D.'s theoretical overviews of film shed light on the ecological inquiries of her work and display an ecological ethics that anticipates contemporary studies of material ecocriticism. Current ecocritical scholarship rejects the notion of bounded bodies in relation to a " pure " world that can be measured, contained, and categorized by promoting discursive practices that " are co-extensive with material processes " (Iovino 454). This essay applies these insights to H.D. and shows how she studies a porous interaction between bodies, dynamic physical realities, and discursive practices.