Egypto-Modernism: James Henry Breasted, H.D., and the New Past

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The paradoxical directive both to “make it new” and to retrieve a usable past has become a commonplace in accounts of American literary modernism. For Pound, Eliot, and H. D., the Classical tradition and its literary monuments provided foundations on which to reinvent poetic form. Moreover, such cultural artifacts served the purpose of articulating an American modernity; as Celena Kusch has argued, American modernists felt “considerable pressure to create an ancient well of artistic experience and ability for themselves.” 1 In achieving these goals, making it new and retrieving the past were neither mutually exclusive activities, nor exclusive to creative writers. As H. D.’s generation of modern poets came of age, Egyptology emerged as an American academic discipline—a key intersection that critics have largely overlooked. James Henry Breasted, the father of American Egyptology and founder of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, would formulate a “New Past” that positioned the United States as Egypt’s cultural inheritor. Influenced by modernist Egyptology as well as by her travels, H. D. came to share with Breasted a belief in Egypt’s cultural primacy. And like Breasted, she would seek a monumental past that did not simply reinshrine the traditional Greco-Roman one. If Europe had a lock on Classical monuments, and the United States lacked monuments in the traditional sense, ancient Egypt offered these Egypto-modernists a new usable past that rerouted Eurocentric cultural transmission. This essay crosses disciplines both in terms of its central figures and its methodology—a collaboration between a lit erary critic and a Classical archaeologist. For Breasted and