Seaward: H. D.'s Helen in Egypt as a Response to Pound's Cantos

Abstract

Despite the firm nook in the modernist pantheon that H.D. has acquired over the past quarter century, she remains an oddly isolated figure within the larger matrix of poetic modernism. Recent scholarship has correctly shifted attention to her late long poems, but there has been little consideration of how these ambitious works relate to other long poems by her contemporaries.(1) Over the last two decades of her life, H.D. composed nine long sequences (if we consider the Trilogy as discrete poems), which at the very least are clearly distinctive from the comparable works by Pound, Eliot, Crane, Williams, Stevens, and others that are commonly taken to be at the center of American poetic modernism. Undoubtedly, the ethereal mode of her work, which tends to filter out the messiness and vulgarities of present history, goes against the grain of contemporary developments. Yet, despite their apparent difference in manner and perspective, H.D.'s long sequences were written within the context of these other works and the larger cultural project in which they are engaged. In this essay, I will focus on the most obvious point of contact: H.D.'s relationship with Pound, and specifically Helen in Egypt as a response to Pound's Cantos. Few readers will be surprised at the suggestion of a significant relationship between these two works, yet the question has received little attention.(2) From the time she was composing Helen in Egypt (1952-55), H.D. frequently mentioned Pound and his Cantos in her correspondence with Norman Holmes Pearson, and evidently approved, was even flattered by, Pearson's reference to Helen in Egypt as her cantos (Friedman 216).(3) More important, if more difficult to pinpoint, is that for H.D. and many others Pound defined the ambitiousness of the modernist poet. In the cases of H.D. and Williams, there appears little in the work of their early decades that would indicate an inevitable evolution toward the composition of long poems, yet both, late in their careers, felt compelled to produce deliberately planned, epic-scale works. In End to Torment, H.D. remarks that Thinking of Ezra's work, I recall my long Helen sequence. Perhaps, there was always a challenge in his creative power. Perhaps, even, [. . .] there was unconscious - really unconscious - rivalry (41). For H.D. personally, Pound represented her simultaneous initiation into both love and poetry, which remained inextricable and mutually motivating throughout her work. But most important, in the Cantos, as well as in his advocacy of other modernists, Pound promoted a conception of the serious artist responding comprehensively to the sense of cultural crisis during the period of world wars. For the older generation of American modernists, who for all their rebelliousness inherited a strong streak of Victorian earnestness, the social and spiritual catastrophe that manifested itself in the First World War and its aftermath obligated an attempt to identify the causes of cultural dysfunction and to offer positive answers for renewal. In this sense, Helen in Egypt, despite its very different mode of procedure, is of a piece with these other modernist epics. H.D.'s ambitious late work, though, was not conceived as simply another rival modernist project alongside those of Pound and others, but as complementary work. This is evident in her unique memoirs - Tribute to Freud and End to Torment, and I would also include Bid Me to Live - which examine her relationships with other major modernists. While commentators have emphasized H.D.'s critiques of Freud, Pound, and Lawrence, this has sometimes obscured the memoirs' deeper intent to dialectically define her companionship with their work. This requires recognizing what distracts from the authentic impulse of their work, including prominently their masculinism, in order to reveal where H.D. joins them in a common effort. Throughout her late work, H.D. repeatedly refers to her participation in a heretical band of artists and cultural workers - bearers of the secret wisdom as she rather immodestly puts it in The Walla Do Not Fall (CP 517) - who whatever their superficial differences and disagreements are ultimately united in a common purpose, a conspiracy for world peace (see By Avon, esp. …