Posting Signs on the Bog: Fixing and Unfixing H.D. Imagiste

Abstract

This article aims to reassess the modernist poet H.D.'s early poetry and to challenge certain critical readings of the early poetry in relation to H.D.'s expression of self. It argues that H.D.'s Sea Garden should not be dismissed as a “false start,” as a place where H.D. was trapped in a restrictive imagist aesthetic, but that the dramatic lyric as used in this collection of poetry enabled her to explore her bisexual self in multiple and multiplying (not split) selves, as both in a state of flux and as enduring through time. It examines H.D.'s work alongside other writers such as Tennyson and Woolf, drawing out common metaphorical structures and patterns and suggests that Woolf and H.D. in particular, were producing literary forms and representations which provide a radical challenge to processes of categorization—a challenge to the notion of category itself.