PEPC LIBRARY

Book Review Desk; 7


HER DEEPEST PASSION WAS D.H. LAWRENCE

By DENIS DONOGHUE; Denis Donoghue holds the Henry James Chair of Letters at New York University. His most recent book is ''Ferocious Alphabets.''
1931 words
14 February 1982
The New York Times
Late City Final Edition
English
Copyright 1982 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

H.D. The Life and Work of an American Poet. By Janice S. Robinson. Illustrated. 490 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. $17.95.


....

Her own work is nearly all autobiographical, though she never removes more than four or five of the seven veils. She didn't stay an Imagist for long. Indeed, Pound did her reputation more harm than good by sticking that label on her. Even now, she is still regarded as the most complete Imagist, with the result that she is assumed to be the most incomplete poet in every respect that counts. Imagism is the Minimalism of poetry; its prescriptions are: no this, no that, no ideas, no comments, no adjectives, write the poem as if you were carving a piece of wood, cut away the excess, leave only the tensions and rhythms. But H.D.'s early poems are superior to other Imagist work in one respect: They don't dawdle or hang about waiting to have their lines admired. They have momentum and, what many Imagist poems lack, urgency: O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters. Fruit cannot drop through this thick air - fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds of grapes.

The later poems largely abandon the pedantry of Imagism in favor of more liberal meters and the freedom of discursiveness: Why did you come to trouble my decline? I am old (I was old till you came).

The limitation of H.D.'s poetry, early and late, arises from her habit of making premature equations. Her mind was infatuated with coincidences, loose etymologies, conjunctions that seemed to connect anything with anything. Lawrence and H.D. were the same age for one day every year, Sept. 10; she thought that significant enough for pages of twinning daydreams . She ransacked the cultures of Greece, Rome and Egypt for identifications. Mary Magdalene was equated with ''Attis-Adonis-Tammuz and his mother who was myrrh,'' Myrrha, in Ovid's ''Metamorphoses,'' who turned into a myrrh tree. And so on. She resorted to landscapes, dreams and mythologies, the most concessive courts to which a poet can appeal against the abrasions of personal and social life. It may be argued that she suffered enough shocks in her daily life to send her all over world and time seeking a poetry of mercurial transitions and communications. Hermes, god of (among other things) messages, was her poetic man. True: I refer to a limitation, not a fatal disability.

What I love in her later poems is their voice, sign of a self-possession often in fear of losing itself, in fear but not in despair: Helen, Helen, come home; there was a Helen before there was a War, but who remembers her?

The Hilda we remember, like the Helen, had much to do with love and war; love from the beginning, war in her London years and the twinning of love and war in virtually all her memories. In the poems, Troy is her name for marriage. But it would not be right to ask of her, as Yeats asked of Maud Gonne: ''Was there another Troy for her to burn?'' H.D. did not burn her Troy; men started the fire, and she watched it run through the town. It is my impression that her early experiences of love with Pound, Aldington and Lawrence imposed upon her a paradigm, a set of expectations and frustrations, which constricted her poetry. Freud helped her, but not enough, and too late. R.P. Blackmur said of Emily Dickinson: ''All her life she was looking for a subject, and the looking was her subject, in life as in poetry.'' The difference between Dickinson and H.D., scale and scope apart, is that H.D. was forced into her subject too soon, and never had quite enough determination to enlarge it or qualify it. Giving her one subject, men held her back from developing it to its largest reach or from finding another. The subject was all she had, except for a rare talent and a pale Greek face. She died on Sept. 28, 1961.


Book Review Desk; 7
SHE WAS NEITHER DRYAD NOR VICTIM
By Katha Pollitt
2285 words
11 March 1984
The New York Times
Late City Final Edition
English
Copyright 1984 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

HERSELF DEFINED

The Poet H.D. and Her World. By Barbara Guest. Illustrated. 360 pp. New York: Doubleday & Co. $18.95. H.D. Collected Poems 1912-1944. Edited by Louis L. Martz. 629 pp. New York: New Directions. $35.

....

The early poems, however, fulfill their ambitions through language, which is, after all, the point of poetry. I'm not persuaded that ''Trilogy'' does. Certainly this long three-part poem represents a high point in H.D.'s life - she regarded it as a poetic and psychic breakthrough after some 15 years of false starts and depression. And it's a feast for the thematically oriented critic, with its Gnostic, astrological and biblical allusions, its crosscultural parallels and large ideas, including the optimistic and feminist vision of modernity seen by Susan Friedman and other recent critics.

But H.D.'s verbal means are just not up to the demands of an epic work. Her language is lax and lacking in surprise: the elixir of life, the philosopher's stone is yours if you surrender sterile logic, trivial reason; so mind dispersed, dared occult lore, found secret doors unlocked, floundered, was lost in sea-depth, sub-conscious ocean where Fish move two-ways, devour.

One person's trite phrase is another's archetypal symbol, and ''Trilogy'' contains many moments better than this, but you have to go through an awful lot of occult lore and secret doors to get to them. On the whole, ''Trilogy'' lacks the sense of language under pressure that is at least one definition of poetry; like all H.D.'s long poems, it rambles because it does not have a structure. Profound it may be, although my taste in profundities does not run in the direction of Hermes Trismegistus and Thoth and ''mer, mere, mater, Maia, Mary, / Star of the Sea, / Mother.'' But it would have been equally profound at half the length, and a much better poem.

It is too early to say if H.D. will get the critical upgrading claimed as her due. For me, she will always be a writer who wrote best when she was not straining after wisdom - but then I admire Blake's ''Songs of Innocence and ''Songs of Experience'' more than ''The Four Zoas.'' Either way, it is good to have restored to us the work of this strange and interesting woman, who, despite her suffering, managed to keep faith with her gifts and her idea of what mattered in life. In the words she gave Eurydice: At least I have the flowers of myself, and my thoughts, no god can take that; I have the fervour of myself for a presence and my own spirit for light . . . before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass.