363H.D. is the last of the great generation born in the 1880s to receive due
recognition. Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence all received early acclaim—
notoriety at least, if not their just due; and William Carlos Williams, after the
publication of Paterson’sfirst four books, soon found his poetry admired in
terms that equal the acclaim won long before by his bitterly resented rival
Eliot. But H.D. had to wait until the 1970s before her true stature could be
widely recognized. Why has H.D. thus lagged behind?
It is not simply because after the appearance of her first volume she
became fixed, delimited, by the label Imagistethat Pound gave her in 1912,
when he sent her early poems to Harriet Monroe for publication in Poetry.
Pound, of course, never meant to trap her in this way; two years later he was
publishing her famous “Oread” in the first issue of Blastas an example of
“Vorticist” poetry. And indeed “H.D. Vorticist” would have been a better
description of her early poetry, with its swirling, dynamic power: the sort of
turbulent force that Henri Gaudier-Brzeska described in his own sculptural
definition of “Vortex”: “Plastic Soul is intensity of life bursting the plane.”^1
This restless movement, the constant surging of intense vitality, lies at the
center of H.D.’s early poetry, and thus the static, lapidary, crystalline
implications usually carried by the word imagismcould never contain the
strength of H.D.’s muse.^2
LOUIS L. MARTZH.D.:
Set Free to Prophesy
From Many Gods and Many Voices: The Role of the Prophet in English and American Modernism.
© 1998 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.