Lee M. Jenkins

The Cambridge companion to modernist poetry

Chronology Introduction Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins Part I. Contexts: 1. Modernist poetry in history David Ayers 2. Schools, movements and manifestoes Paul Peppis 3. The poetics of modernism Peter Nicholls 4. Gender, sexuality and the modernist poem Christanne Miller Part II. Authors and Alliances: 5. Pound or Eliot: whose era? Lawrence Rainey 6. HD and revisionary mythmaking Rachel Blau DuPlessis 7. Yeats, Ireland, modernism Anne Fogarty 8. Modernist poetry in the British Isles Drew Milne 9. US modernism I. Moore, Stevens and the modernist lyric Bonnie Costello 10. US modernism II. The other tradition: Williams, Zukofsky, Olson Mark Scroggins 11. The poetry of the Harlem Renaissance Sharon L. Jones 12. Calibans modernity: postcolonial poetry of Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean Jahan Ramazani Part III. Receptions: 13. Modernist poetry and the canon Jason Harding Guide to further reading Index.

H.D. and revisionary myth-making

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle [Aldington], 1886-1961), with these initials as her authorial signet, had a literary career as an author of lyric poetry, long poems, essay/memoirs and novels and, briefly, as a film-maker and actress. Born in the United States from a well-to-do, intellectual family, adherents of Moravian Protestantism, H.D. became an expatriate writer and British citizen, living in London and later in Switzerland. She had a complex relational life as a bisexual woman, was married with one daughter (from an affair), enjoyed a number of erotic relationships with men and women, and lived in a companionate, lesbian relationship with Bryher (Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983) for the majority of her life. She was theoretically and personally invested in psychoanalysis, archaeological discoveries, classical culture, cinema, the occult and comparative religious study; she also meditated the array and meanings of her erotic and relational ties in richly layered prose and poetry, including memoirs of her brief but important analysis with Freud. Both world wars profoundly affected her writing. Indeed, many of modernisms most distinctive long poems were written in large measure to confront these wars, to give accounts of their damage and to construct alternative meanings. H.D.s critical reputation, like that of many other modernist women, was quite uneven until the advent of feminist scholarship. Despite her full writing career and panoply of fascinating texts, she was seen as Imagist (or short-poem writer) only, localised to some work in the 1910s as fully representative, with her total oeuvre sometimes marginalised and discredited. Some poets and fewer academics (like Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov and L. S. Dembo) always insisted on her pertinence; H.D.s own careful archive at Beinecke Library, Yale University, set up by H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson, assisted the recovery of her importance by a growing number of scholars.

Myths and Texts

The widespread turn to myth by modern writers is more commonly acknowledged than understood partly because it has no single genesis or meaning. The present chapter, therefore, will discriminate some of its principal manifestations through their historical and philosophical contexts. Historically speaking, modernist appreciation of myth descends from a European romantic tradition in which literary creation and a national or folk spirit were intimately associated; yet it also constitutes a distinctive new phase reflecting philosophical and political shifts, as well as other cultural and intellectual developments around the turn of the twentieth century. The modern valorising of myth was partly in response to the waning of religious belief and authority. In the anglophone tradition, a classic argument is set out in Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma (1873). A literal belief in the Biblical story of human origins had become widely untenable due to the growing prestige of scientific protocols of thought, a new knowledge of the age of the earth, the evolutionary origins of its inhabitants, and the impact of modern scholarship on Biblical studies. But Arnold argued that the Bible, far from losing its truth value thereby, had acquired a new and more intrinsic significance. It was the literary achievement of the Hebraic people articulating a development of moral consciousness which was their peculiar contribution to human culture. Literature bearing this weight of cultural meaning, and seen as the primordial production of a complex of values drawn from ancestral experience, is effectively myth. Myth, in other words, may denote a falsehood, or it can be the fundamental narrative of a culture, and it can be both at once. Some