Living up to Her “Avant-Guardism”: H.D. and the Senescence of Classical Modernism

Hobson Hobson

doi:10.3390/h8040162

Abstract

In a journal entry from 1957, H.D. writes that Adorno’s description of the aging of modernist music might easily apply to the fate of her own work in the post-war period: “Among other fascinating things, he [Adorno] says that Bartók ‘could not quite live up to his own avant-guardism’ [sic] […]. I felt the phrase applied, in a way, to myself and my Helen sequence” (H.D. 2015, p. 40). H.D.’s remark refers to her long poem, Helen in Egypt (1960), which, with its engagement with classical sources and epic themes, seemed to some to be a throwback to an earlier modernist period in which Pound, Joyce, Eliot and H.D. herself had looked to ancient models as a means of reinvigorating modern literature. What did it mean for H.D. to feel that her work had outlived its time, to be a first-generation modernist still writing in that mode after many of her peers and their achievements had passed into history? This article explores H.D.’s sense that her practice was at odds with contemporary demands for poetry to answer to immediate historical concerns. It also considers her case against the critics in letters, notes and in Helen in Egypt which contains its own defense of the relevance of classical modernism to the post-war present day.

Highlights

In a journal entry from 1957, H.D. touched on the work of the Frankfurt School theorist, TheodorAdorno
She wrote that Adorno’s description of the aging of modernist music might apply to the fate of her own late work: “Among other fascinating things, he [Adorno] says that Bartók ‘could not quite live up to his own avant-guardism’ [sic] [ . . . ]
H.D. worried that her poem did not live up to the increasing demand for art to be responsive to present-day realities and, that her choice of an epic subject could be seen as an attempt to eschew the difficult realities of history altogether in favor of the consolations of the distant past

Summary

Introduction

In a journal entry from 1957, H.D. touched on the work of the Frankfurt School theorist, Theodor. Helen in Egypt asks whether the epic tradition was, or ever could be, a transparent response to the “actuality” of war and, in suggesting that it could not, drives towards an insistence on the ultimate ambiguity and unknowability of what really happened in war In concluding his discussion of Adorno on the condition of art after WWII, Bernstein argues that, “the only legitimate cultural practices would be ones that reflectively put themselves and their past in question” Duncan, were taking her mythic methods and use of classical sources as the template for their own “timely” creations

The Senescence of the Avant-Garde

Outliving the Expected Ending