‘After his wine-dark sea’

Abstract

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary writers, repeatedly questions the (im)possibility of telling stories, of writing poetry, after Homer. Focusing upon a relatively neglected aspect of H.D.’s classicism, this chapter investigates the ways in which H.D.’s poetry engages directly, and sometimes playfully, with Homeric epic. After analysing a selection of her earlier works (‘A Dead Priestess Speaks’, ‘Calypso’, ‘At Ithaca’, ‘Circe’, ‘Odyssey’) for insights into H.D.’s witty, quasi-counterfactual classicism, it offers a close reading of the Homeric features of H.D.’s final poem, the 1961 epic Helen in Egypt. The analysis offered here argues that H.D.’s responses to Homer demonstrate a ‘releasing’ of pre-existing narrative emphases rather than a ‘resistant’ reading against the grain of the Homeric tradition, in a more sympathetic and less antagonistic engagement with the Homeric source texts than received readings tend to acknowledge.