Modern American Poetry

(Sean Pound) #1

(^392) Louis L. Martz
617–18. An interpretation of these changes has been given by Elizabeth Dodd in The Veiled
Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück,57–70.



  1. Introduction to CP,xxiii; Burnett, H.D. between Image and Epic: The Mysteries of Her
    Poetics,104.

  2. Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall, Advent,45–46; hereafter cited as TTF.

  3. The relation of H.D.’s couplets (a “marked divergence from the style of H.D.’s
    earlier verse”) to the couplets of the Pythian has been noted by Sandra M. Gilbert and
    Susan Gubar in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century,
    3:192.

  4. The phrase “my writing” refers directly to the “writing on the wall,” but it may
    well be taken to describe H.D.’s own writing.

  5. For an account of her notorious performance as a “Red” in Boston see Irma
    Duncan and Allan Ross Macdougall, Isadora Duncan’s Russian Days and Her Last Years in
    France(London: Gollancz, 1929), 164–65. The color red pursued Isadora even at her
    death, when her red shawl became entangled in the wheel of that Bugatti. In “The
    Dancer” H.D. presents herself as a witness of an actual performance: could this possibly
    have been the famous “Roses from the South” for which we have detailed choreographical
    directions? (See the recent volume by Nadia Chilkovsky Nahumck, Isadora Duncan: The
    Dances[Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1994], 391–405). If
    this were so, the dance might provide another reason for the prefix “rhodo.” In the reprise
    of the Dancer in the next poem of this triad, “The Master,” H.D. gives (CP,456) a more
    precise description of the “rhododendron” dance: “she leaps from rock to rock / (it was
    only a small circle for her dance) / and the hills dance, / she conjures the hills;
    /rhododendrons / awake.” In this reprise the Dancer is three times addressed as
    “Rhodocleia” at the close; the name is evidently derived from the Greek ???os, meaning
    “fame” or “glory”: “red fame,” “rose glory.” To see the Dancer as Isadora would complete
    the triad with another famous figure, to match the allusions to Freud and Lawrence in the
    two subsequent poems. In CPI suggested that the Dancer might be the actress-ballerina
    Anny Ahlers (CP,xxviii, 614 n. 15). But I now think this identification is unlikely, except as
    the early death of Anny Ahlers in 1933 may have precipitated a memory of Isadora.

  6. In this opening H.D. seems to be using the word strangein the old sense of
    “foreign,” “situated outside one’s own land” (OED). These two Americans have come
    together (in Paris?) from “strange cities” (London, Moscow). Then at the outset of the
    second section she adds: “I am now from the city / of thinkers, of wisdom-makers.” Is this
    the “Miletus” in which she met with Freud? The whole poem sounds like a backward
    projection, an experience relived in the present. For H.D.’s powers of projection see
    Adalaide Morris, “The Concept of Projection: H.D.’s Visionary Powers.” In Feminist
    Studies 7 (1981): 407–16, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Susan Stanford Friedman published
    “The Master,” followed by their essay, “‘Woman Is Perfect’: H.D.’s Debate with Freud.”

  7. Ion: A Play after Euripides,rev. John Walsh, 112; hereafter cited as Ion.

  8. H.D.–Pearson Correspondence, H.D. Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
    CP(367–439) gives the whole group in H.D.’s arrangement. It is a series that moves from
    Greek themes through overtly personal poems of love and friendship to the final poem,
    “Magician” (originally entitled “Master”). (See introduction to CP,xxiv–xxvi.)

  9. H.D. between Image and Epic,chap. 9.

  10. See below, p. 118–19.

  11. Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land,3:180.

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