A History of American Literature

362 Making It New: 1900–1945

since they represent a far more open, and frequently moving, attempt to discover

what H.D. called “the finite definition / of the infinite.” In making this attempt, she

drew on Greek and Egyptian mythology, her own Moravian heritage, astrology, psy-

choanalysis, and numerology, and then fashioned out of those diverse sources a

poetry that is at once crystalline and prophetic: a tough, muscular, and yet mystical

verse to which she gave the title “spiritual realism.”

All through her life, H.D. retained an intense belief in the religious possibilities of

art – or, to be more exact, in the mystical nature of the creative process, the act of

turning experience into words. “Writing ... trains one to a sort of yogi or majic [sic]

power,” she insisted, “it is a sort of contemplation, it is living on another plane.” In

her eyes, poetry tended to become an equivalent of prayer. Her great war trilogy

makes this especially clear. Written in London during World War II, the three books

that comprise the trilogy – The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels

(1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946) – represent a search for “ancient

wisdom,” the still, generative center at the heart of the contemporary turbulence.

“We are voyagers,” she declares:

discoverers

of the not-known

the unrecorded;

we have no map;

possibly we will reach heaven,

haven.

Firm in the belief that “every concrete object / has abstract value,” she attempts to

fashion the mystery of personality, to recreate her own identity – to write herself by

reinventing her life in the process of remembering and rehearsing it. The activity

hauntingly recalls Whitman’s in “Song of Myself ” as, indeed, does H.D.’s firm denial

of egocentricity: “my mind (yours),” she insists, “ / your way of thought (mine).”

Each individual imagination has its “intricate map,” we are told, but each map charts

the same “eternal realities”; as in all great American epics, to sing and celebrate

oneself is also to sing and celebrate others.

H.D.’s trilogy is an American epic, then, but it is also an Imagist epic: it does not,

even in its form, represent a departure from her poetic beginnings. The reason is

simple. Like Whitman, H.D. dispenses with narrative; far more than Whitman,

(^) however, she depends on what Pound called the ideogrammic method – which
involves, essentially, a rapid association of images. Images are, in H.D.’s own words,
“superimposed on one another like a stack of photographic negatives:” one image or
perception leads into another and the reader’s imagination is actively engaged,
making the connections, discovering the point of intersection. Instead of a story, in
which events occur in time, or a process of logical argument, there is a juxtaposing
or overlaying of different images or impressions; and their interaction, the energy
that passes between them, constitutes the “argument” of the poem. In her trilogy,
H.D. characteristically uses an image to describe this Imagistic technique – of the
many colors which, at their point of intersecting, become one color:
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