H.D.’s American Sea Garden: Drowning the Idyll Threat to US Modernism

Abstract

H.D.'s first poetry collection, Sea Garden (1916), in many ways exemplifies imagist poetic strategies, with its terse portraits of flowers, landscapes, and coastal inhabitants. Responding to poems' settings, contemporary scholarship often places Sea Garden outside modernist debates about national or cosmopolitan literary movements and instead emphasizes its mythic qualities or its engagement with issues of gender and sexuality. (1) In fact, H.D. today is often considered marginal to geopolitical, cosmopolitan, or nationalist concerns of current modernist studies. Jacob Korg, for example, argues that H.D., while fully sharing [Ezra] Pound's conviction that new forms were needed for new times, did not include contemporary world in her Imagist poetry. She did not observe superficialities of social life, as Pound did, or, with few exceptions, take up urban themes, as Eliot did. The environment of her early poems is nearly exclusively that of ancient Greece. (44-45) Although H.D.'s adaptation of Greek literature and reliance on Greek names--like Pound's use of Chinese--are undeniable, I would like to reconsider argument that her imagist poetry sets aside details of contemporary world. The dryads and gods of Sea Garden may come from Greek poetry, but only one poem, Acon, names Greek places, and it is not set in them. No poem indicates that speaker's location is in Greece, and no poem grounds itself firmly in a classical historical context. Instead, Sea Garden engages same questions of international, cosmopolitan identity and American national belonging that are central to modernist debates about defining US literary identity. Far from evading contemporary world, H.D.'s first poetry collection maps a space for modern American authorship in a global context. And it does this by focusing on ocean that defines geography of transatlantic modernity. Certainly Sea Garden can be read in transnational terms Rebecca Walkowitz identifies in Cosmopolitan Style. Concentrating on twentieth-century British literature, Walkowitz explores doubled cultural entanglements that reflect the literal knotting together of cultures and experiences that seem to be disparate ... and effect of ethical discomfort or embarrassment that is generated by or associations (20). Yet, while H.D. might knot together ancient Greek poetic tradition and scenes from her travels in twentieth-century Europe, I would argue that incommensurate and unconventional associations that drive these early poems are particularly American. Early twentieth-century Anglo European representations of US culture often prompted discomfort and embarrassment for US writers. Even a cursory glance at English-language literary magazines of first few decades of twentieth century reveals that literary critics were absorbed by questions of US national character or spirit. In 1910s and 20s, dozens of American anthologies fought to name distinct, positive qualities of a new US poetry. (2) And for years before that, hardly an issue of US literary magazines went by without some comparative analysis of American poetry and its British precursors designed to address fundamental definitional problems: Does American poetry exist? Is it any good? Will England like it? The drive for US poetry to hold up under comparison to canon of British literature reveals a deeper concern about construction of both US and international modernist movements to which H.D. belonged. These questions circulated because US was seen not to have its own culture but rather to be fledgling heir of its many parent cultures. Sympathetic British reviewers like Robert Nichols might praise US's attempt to merge a mixed heritage into one English-speaking voice of American, in which the properties of ail those nations plus something new becomes vocal (413), but early twentieth-century responses to US poetry continually turn to British critical approval to authorize its value. …