In attempting to combine theosophy and psychology to create the grounds for a critical discourse for the poem, Robert Duncan makes of H.D. something she is not quite, yet his target is elsewhere & is in fact most clearly figured not in The H.D. Book but in title of his prose poem sequence, The Structure of Rime, emphasis now upon Structure. Marxist economics, Freudian analysis, Jakobson’s analysis of language out of Saussure, Levi-Strauss’ categorization of mythology, Einstein’s ability to harness the power of the sun from elements too small for the human eye to notice all share one key feature – an ability to unravel mysteries that, if looked at only on the surface, cannot be seen at all. The dancing commodities of the first chapter of Capital yield, even for the crudest economic determinist of the Stalinoid school, a base that will account for this flashy, glittering superstructure. For Duncan, the confluence of these intellectual movements raises the category of the Hidden to a privileged position that must have resonated deeply with his theosophist roots as a child, with its claim that secretly all religions are one if only we can deep enough, and also with Duncan’s own experience of participating in a religion that, once his family moved from the near-Berkeley suburb of Alameda to the farming center of Bakersfield, itself became hidden, something not voiced outside of the household, and indeed hardly mentioned at all once the grandmother died, and then entirely absent following the death of his adoptive father. The masterwork of theosophy is itself called The Secret Doctrine, first published by Madam Blavatsky in 1888.

The Moravian church dates itself back to the Hussites of some 500 years ago, although it found its form & voice through the labors of Count Zinzendorf early in the 18^th century. While its focus is inherently a Christian one where theosophy goes further, arguing for the unification of all the world’s religions, both share a mystical heritage and a deep sense that the world is something like a spiritual version of the X files. While Doolittle’s connection to her religious roots appear to have been more tenuous even than Duncan’s, her treatment by Freud is for Duncan a key event, for it is the moment when the world’s discourses cross paths. It is the point through which the intellectual traditions touch the deep personal backgrounds for both these poets.

For the most part, in the 1950s, poetic modernism, both early & late, has stayed clear of these intellectual traditions. New Criticism may be able to trace its roots through Rene Wellek to the Prague School of Linguistics and thus to Jakobson, the onetime protégé of Viktor Shklovsky, but it has been captured by a group of exceptionally conservative, mostly anti-modern poets, the Agrarians, who use its vocabulary to impose an anti-intellectual lyric regime that by 1940 has begun to systematically capture the English departments of North America. Unlike Duncan, whose agenda demands that he join discourses together, these "specialized readers" work hard to keep literary criticism (and by extension literature) free of these other intellectual discourses, such as pyschoanalysis.

If, in fact, Doolittle had ever been, as she presents herself, a student of Freud, Duncan’s argument for the joining of these traditions in her late work might carry more weight. But the reality is that she was strictly a patient, and not an especially complete one at that. Her memoir, Tribute to Freud, is muddled precisely by her inability to acknowledge her role in these sessions. Duncan writes:

Beauty under attack, Imagism under attack, pacifism under attack, and, as the Wars like great Dreams began to make it clear, life itself under attack—H.D. had an affinity for heretical causes. In psychoanalysis again she found a cult under attack. "Upon my suggestion to H.D. that psychoanalysis seemed to affect some people as does Christian Science," Robert McAlmon argues with the contempt commonsense has for such things, "she took me seriously and said yes, it was a religion." It was, Freud felt, to take the place of religion, and he thought always of psychoanalysis under attack as Truth under attack, for the civilization itself—indeed, civilization itself—was at war against knowing anything about, much less recognizing within, the contents of the unconscious. "My discoveries are a basis for a very grave philosophy," she tells us Freud told her: "There are very few who understand this, there are very few who are capable of understanding this."

For Duncan, The H.D. Book promised – as his mature writing project promised – the discourse that would bring these threads together – it’s the point Duncan is constantly talking around in this book, and why (for example) he thinks to include dream materials (including dream dialogs with H.D., a kind of posthumous interview methodology). Its goal is so very ambitious – to succeed would put Duncan not only alongside Olson or Williams or Pound, but Freud & Marx & Krishnamurti – that the inability of Duncan to complete this project, to ever be done with it, appears to have been, shall we say, inscribed at its beginning.