You are clear
O rose, cut in rock,
hard as the descent of hail.
I could scrape the colour
from the petals
like spilt dye from a rock.
If I could break you
I could break a tree.
If I could stir
I could break a tree—
I could break you.
The imagist thing in the poem, the hard “cut in rock” rose and the thick heat, contained the suggestion of a tense suspended awareness that was to be an ideal of modern sensibility in the second decade of the century and to find its expression in works of that generation in the nineteen-twenties. This experience hung upon its bough, and these poems were like moments brought to and kept in a perfection, roses, fruits or cut stones, valued for their implied discrimination. But the poet’s dramatic statement of the wish to be freed from this keep of the perfect moment was not imagist, was romantic, and marred the example that readers searching for H.D. the Imagist sought in the poem. The poems most anthologists have taken, the poems that have been selected to label H.D., are few and were written in the brief period between 1912 and 1916. Even these have been mis-taken, removed from the total context of poetic experience to which they belong, for the work of these years included also “The Shrine” and “The Gift,” which are not imagist but dramatic in intent, and poems like “Cities” or “The Tribute,” which plead the cause of Beauty against the squalor of commerce or lament the death of young men in the war. So too, the second section of the poem “Garden” has been set apart from its original intent, to become exemplary of clarity, finish, hardness—self-containment, and to stand not as part of H.D.’s creative consciousness but as an example of Imagism. The poem “Heat” now, presented by the anthologist’s picture, appears to have been written in order to capture the very image of stasis of heat and fruit that the poet longs to be shattered. But when we go back of the anthology establishment to contemporary reviews of H.D.’s Collected Poems in 1925, we find that Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Edward Sapir—or, earlier, John Gould Fletcher, reviewing the volume Sea Garden in 1917—see her work as a whole, having its vital import beyond and even outside of the Imagist program.
It was Ezra Pound who had first scratched that word at the end of a manuscript of hers—“H.D. Imagiste.” Later he was to say that he had started the Imagist idea to launch the poetry of H.D. In the directives Pound drew up—the credo of 1912—the “A Few Don’ts” of 1913, included again in “A Retrospect” of 1917—the new idea of the image goes along with a new idea of poetic form, of composing in the sequence of the musical phrase, and with another idea of—“economy,” he calls it—purification of the poem. The waste of tone color and ornament is to be cleared away; abstraction, whatever diffuse suggestion, must go. It is an imperative toward perfection that haunts the aesthetic propositions of Imagism.
So too, in Pound’s idea of the image itself the perfectionist drive appears, for, though the image Pound proposes is “an intellectual and emotional complex,” the complex does not proliferate but is realized “in an instant of time.” Here, though the perfect and the complex would seem to be of different orders, Pound projects the aesthetic, even moral, suggestion of a perfected experience or epiphany: “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” They were working toward an intensity, a concentration of poetic force. Pound had brooded from a poem of thirty lines, he tells us, striving to render an emotion that had arisen in the sight of beautiful faces seen crowded in the Paris Metro:
Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
For Pound, H.D. in certain poems had realized the ideal of purity demanded; her poetic line pruned and tried toward the hardness of an utter economy exemplified “craftsmanship,” and in the address of her poems she praised the beauty of flowers, trees, stones, or grains of sand, that had been tried by the elements. She had perfected her name Hilda Doolittle too, leaving the bare initials, the essential signature that might be cut in stone. It was as Ezra Pound wanted her. That first Imagist poem, she tells us, after his reading, had been “now slashed with his creative pencil, ‘cut this out, shorten this line’.” And Pound was the first to write, when the poems of H.D.’s Lawrencian period began to appear in The Egoist in 1917—“The God,” “Adonis,” “Pygmalion,” “Eurydice”—that she had “spoiled the ‘few but perfect’ positions which she might have held on to.”
The definition of the image in the talk of Pound, H.D., and Aldington, in the tearoom of the British Museum in 1912, had led to the declarations of a literary movement, and it gave an advertising label to the work of new poems appearing in The Egoist, where Richard Aldington had become an editor in 1913, and in the United States in Poetry, where Harriet Monroe might be responsive, it was hoped, to Pound’s advice. After Pound’s anthology presenting the group, Des Imagistes of 1914, what had been a working program in poetry was fully launched as a literary fashion, and the idea of H.D.’s being the most perfect craftsman of the new Perfecti who had received that consolamentum, the “one image in a lifetime,” was to be a central tenet. The original proposition of the Image had harkened back to intellectual and emotional overtones of the Symbolist era even as it moved forward toward a functionalism that was in the Modernist aesthetic to be anti-Symbolist. Like Symbolism, Pound’s Imagism had been conceived as a cult of the elect in art. But with the Imagist anthologies of 1915, 1916, and 1917, edited by Amy Lowell, H.D., and Aldington, the Imagist movement became generalized and popularized. The ideas of image, composition by musical phrase, and verbal economy were let go into the lowest common denominators of impressionism, vers libre, and everyday speech. By 1937, twenty-five years after the birth of Imagism, all reference to the word image, once defined as presenting an intellectual and emotional complex, had been dissipated, and the term had come to indicate whatever in a poem brought a picture to the mind of the reader.
It was not only in “Amygism,” as Pound dubbed the heretical popularization, that the first character of the Image as epiphany was lost, for Pound himself was to take as his project the work of small m modernists whose use of the image was profoundly anti-Imagist. For T. E. Hulme, whose work had already been published by Pound at the end of the volume Ripostes in 1912, and often in Eliot’s poems, the image had not been the nexus of an experience but the opportunity of an expression, of a striking figure in the author’s rhetoric. Whatever else they were, the images—in Hulme’s poem “Autumn,” the ruddy moon that may be like a red-faced farmer peering over a hedge, or in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the evening that may be like a patient etherized upon a table—are not mythopoeic in their operation or intent, not deepening our sense of the reality of moon or of evening, but present extension of their author’s wit, personal conceits. In the work of Amy Lowell, the image was imitative of sensory appearances informed by mood, a kind of literary impressionism. The persuasive personal conceit and the sensual personal impression were what most critics and readers readily accepted as the range of the image.
The modern sensibilities of Hulme, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis excited Pound, and he sought to identify his work with theirs, but as Lewis saw in Time and Western Man, Pound was “A Man in Love with the Past,” and for all his efforts to make of The Cantos a dynamic ideogram, The Cantos remain a post-Symbolist work. For Pound, as for H.D., as for Lawrence or for Williams, the image was not an invention but a numinous event in language, a showing forth of a commanding Reality in the passing personal real. Like James Joyce, they sought epiphanies. “Image,” for Pound, was carefully so set off by quotation marks and spelled with the capital. Although he would disarm us with his reference to “the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart” (the reference to Dr. Bernard Hart, Fellow of University
College, London, perhaps to exorcise the thought of Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, when speaking of the term complex), there is, for those readers who are wary of the context of Pound’s thought immersed as it is in the tradition of Poetry and the Spirit of Romance, a beckoning suggestion in the “intellectual and emotional complex” of that Intellect in which man comes close to the Creative Intent, of the “Et omniformis omnis intellectus est” from Psellos, which remains from the beginning thematic in The Cantos, or of that “apprehension by means of the potential intellect,” which Dante tells us is Man’s true mode of being. “Did this ‘close ring,’ this aristocracy of emotion,” the youthful Pound writes in the essay “Psychology and Troubadours,” “evolve, out of its half memories of Hellenistic mysteries, a cult—a cult stricter, or more subtle, than that of the celibate ascetics, a cult for the purgation of the soul . . . ?” The “complex” then was a node involving not only the psyche, as that term is used by modern psychologists, but the soul, as that term is used by esoteric schools. So too, the quotation marks and the capitalization, setting the word “Image” apart, carried for the knowing reader the sense that the word had a special meaning beyond the apparent. “Image” and “Intellect” in the framework of Gnostic and neo-Platonic doctrines that haunt Pound’s cantos to the last are terms of a Reality that is cosmic and spiritual; they are terms of a visionary realism.
Reviewing H.D.’s volume Sea Garden, John Gould Fletcher, a fellow Imagist, wrote:
It is really about the soul, or the primal intelligence, or the Nous, or whatever we choose to call that link that binds us to the unseen and uncreated. . . . To penetrate H.D.’s inner meaning, it is only necessary that we approach her poetry with an open and responsive mind. . . . But this state of mind, receptive, quiescent, is also necessary if we are to understand Plotinus, or Dionysius the Areopagite, or Paracelsus, or Behmen, or Swedenborg, or Blake.
That Image and Intellect may have been in the first phase of Imagism charged with more than a literary meaning begins to be clear.
Pound in his study of Dante and in his conversations and readings with Yeats had come into what was to be a lifelong admiration of Iamblichus and Proclus, late neo-Platonists, in whose imaginations the Image had taken on powers of person and angelic being. Fletcher’s early review of H.D. would indicate that for others too in the Imagist circle—the “School of Images” Pound calls it in his “Prefatory Note” to Hulme’s poems—for H.D. then, and for some contemporary readers of H.D.’s work, the image of the Imagists was associated with the Image, with Eidolon and Idea as they appear in Hellenistic and again in late Medieval and Renaissance speculation. “One must consider that the types which joined these cults survived, in Provence,” Pound writes in “Psychology and Troubadours”: “and survive, today—priests, maenads, and the rest—though there is in our society no provision for them.”
The very movement of the line might be a magic then, theurgic in its intent, in which the Image was specially evoked. The line was to be expressive—that was the demand of the modern aesthetic, and Pound and H.D. were acutely sensitive to the style that the age demanded; but it was also to be efficacious—it was not to express the Image but to call up its Presence, to cause it to happen. We may read H.D.’s proposal in the Imagist Anthology of 1915 with a gathering suspicion: “A new cadence means a new idea” takes on a special meaning when the word idea is colored by the poetic lore of neo-Platonic theurgy. Pound’s injunction “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase” may not only be a departure from literary conventions but a conversion to heresies of a spiritual order. There was no thing that was not, given the proper instant in time and intent in vision, Image. There was no image that was not, properly rendered, the nexus of divine and elemental orders in the human world. Anguish and ecstasy gave presence to, and were aroused by a presence in, the natural world. Rocks and sea, thunderous surfs, gardens and orchards actually exposed the soul to the spiritual presence, flooded it with the presence—all but unbearably—and yet, at the same time, sheltered it within the presence.
“To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation”—this second commandment of Pound’s Imagist manifesto was essential in the high art that lay back of the famous rapture of H.D.’s early work, the root in practice of her lyric genius. The line of her verse grew taut, tempered to keep an edge naked in experience, tense to provide a mode in which reverberations of these presences might be heard. The image and the voice or dramatic mask provided the nexus of a mystery in Poetry corresponding to the outer and inner worlds in which the poetess, now a priestess in the mysteries of the language, worked toward higher and finer modes of participation in a mystery in Life Itself.
The new poetry was not to be a commodity, a negotiable sensibility in literature or culture, but an instrument in a process of spirit. Pound in his Cavalcanti essay during this early period of Imagism describes such a spiritual process in the contribution of Provence to poetry:
The whole break of Provence with this world . . . is the dogma that there is some proportion between the fine thing held in the mind, and the inferior thing ready for instant consumption. . . . You deal with an interactive force: the virtu in short. . . . The conception of the body as perfect instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades.
We find in H.D.’s early work the evocation not only of presences of Nature but of the poet’s own nature, her temper or virtu. In the poem “Toward the Piraeus” she pictures her own poetic virtu, contrasting her power with that of another who may have been—for this is one of her Lawrencian poems—D. H. Lawrence:
my own lesser, yet still somewhat fine-wrought,
fiery-tempered, delicate, over-passionate steel.
It is an image of an instrument prepared for experience that is at once the image of her physical body, her spirit, and the temperament of the verse itself. It was an image too of tension in passion that appealed to the sentiments of the modernist generation. Not the erotic sensualities of the poem “Hymen” or the intoxications of “Heliodora” came to stand for H.D.’s special quality as a poet among her admirers, but the tenseness itself, the almost frigid apprehension of the passionate that in the poem “Wash of Cold River” she had characterized as most hers, was taken as her primary attribute:
all the sheer rapture
that I would take
to mould a clear
and frigid statue;
We might read “carve” for “mould,” for the fiery tempered steel of the poet’s self-projection is the steel of the sculptor’s chisel, shaping the resistant stone. The art that H.D. projects is haunted by Gaudier-Brzeska’s messianic doctrines of sculptural energy and sculptural feeling that swept Pound up into his Vorticist period. Gaudier-Brzeska sought the expression of challenge and intensity that found modelling insipid. “He cut stone until its edge was like metal,” Pound tells us in his work on Gaudier: “The softness of castings displeased him and so he cut the brass direct.”
The matter is of marble, not of clay:
rare, of pure texture,
beautiful space and line,
marble to grace
your inaccessible shrine.
So H.D. concludes “Wash of Cold River.” Her art, and her sense of the passionate, demanded fineness of feeling, exactness, that was not soft or compliant but hard and resistant. She suggested in poems like “Sea Rose,” “Sea Lily,” “Sea Violet,” or “Pear Tree,” an exquisite sensibility, leaf and petal delicately cut, “precious,” “like flint / on a bright stone,” “fragile as agate,” “from such a rare silver,” at once “precious,” “fragile,” “rare,” the bane of critics-to-be, and yet to be shaped only by elemental energies, by sea and wind, furrowed “with hard edge.”
Pound, too, in his Cavalcanti essay refers to the stone and the stone-cutter’s art in order to illuminate the poet’s art:
The god is inside the stone, vacuos exercet aera morsus. The force is arrested, but there is never any question about its latency, ab
out the force being the essential and the rest ‘accidental’ in the philosophical technical sense. The shape occurs.
It is along these lines that, in “Pygmalion” (published early in 1917), H.D. presents the poet as the sculptor questioning the vitalities at work in his art beyond the mastery of the craft:
am I master of this
swirl upon swirl of light?
In the magic of the stone’s being carved, the Divine and the human meet; the force of the work is interactive. That demonically inspired restless spirit of the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska haunted not only Pound but H.D., for, in the few years before his fateful death in the First World War, charged with the vision of a vortex of energies to be released in matter toward form in which the drive of his own genius might be consummated, he had had evenings too with the Aldingtons, talking on and on to pour out the message of his Vortex. Possessed by his spirit, or married to his spirit, the sculptor in H.D.’s poem works in stone and light, even as the poet works in the densities of the given meanings of words and in the aura of a gathering music, a breath informing the poem, until an image emerges in the work, working the medium until the work itself is immediate to the mind. But this “work” is both a power and, the artist begins to realize, a person. The work of art is itself a living presence in which its creator stands. Man, stone, and light, cooperate in the event. “Am I the god?” Pygmalion asks:
The H.D. Book Page 5