Making It New: 1900–1945 361predetermined verse forms. Having done this, his or her aim should be to produce
movements and melodies intrinsic to the occasion: tough, sinuous, sharply etched
rhythms that described the contours of an individual experience – a hidden but
clearly audible music that captured the pace, poise, and tone of the personal voice.
In this sense, Imagism – and the many modernist poets who pursued a necessary
organic rhythm – took their cue, not only from the innovations of an obvious
experimentalist in free verse like Walt Whitman, but from idiosyncratic rhythmists
like Poe and Dickinson. And to this extent, the Imagist belief in a flexible verse form
(which was in turn the symptom of a broader commitment to an open,
unpremeditated structure) was to find expression both in the language experiments
of e.e. cummings and Marianne Moore, and in the less extreme but no less original
musical shapes of Hart Crane.
Among the poems included in the 1915 Imagist anthology was “Oread” by H.D.
(1886–1961). Cited by Pound as the supreme example of an Imagist poem, it is
besides a perfect illustration of what has been referred to as the “accurate mystery”
of H.D.’s work. Perhaps the first thing that strikes a reader about that work is the
absence of certain familiar elements. There are no similes, no symbols, no generalized
reflections or didacticism, no rhymes, no regular meter, no narrative. What is there
instead is a pellucid clarity of diction, and a rhythm that is organic, intrinsic to the
mood of the poem; there is a vivid economy of language, in which each word seems
to have been carefully chiseled out of other contexts, and there is a subtle technique
of intensification by repetition – no phrase is remarkable in itself, perhaps, but there
is a sense of rapt incantation, an enthralled dwelling on particular cadences that
gives a hermetic quality, a prophetic power, to the whole. It is the entire poem that is
experienced, not a striking line, a felicitous comparison, or an ingenious rhyme; the
poem has become the unit of meaning and not the word, so each single word can
remain stark, simple, and unpretentious. In “Oread” the image that constitutes the
poem becomes not merely a medium for describing a sensation but the sensation
itself. The sea is the pinewood, the pinewood is the sea, the wind surrounds and
inhabits both; and the Greek mountain-nymph of the title comprehends and
becomes identified with all three elements. There is a dynamic and unified complex,
an ecstatic fusion of natural and human energies; and the image represents the point
of fusion, “the precise instant” (to quote a remark of Pound’s) “when a thing outward
and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”
“Oread” is typical of H.D.’s work in many ways. “I would be lonely,” she once
admitted, while living at the heart of literary London, “but for the intensity of my ...
inner life.” And this became the subject of her work, from the early Imagist verse to
the later, more oracular poems: the secret existence that cast her, in the midst of
company, into permanent but willing exile, the ecstatic sense of inhabiting a
borderline between land and ocean, outer world and inner, time and eternity. The
earlier work (of which “Oread” is an example) is what she is, perhaps, best known
for. Here, greatly influenced by classical Greek poetry, H.D. speaks in a taut and
suggestive manner, omitting everything that is inessential, structurally or emotionally
unimportant. But the later poems, although less well known, are just as notable,GGray_c04.indd 361ray_c 04 .indd 361 8 8/1/2011 7:53:50 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 50 AM