H. D.

I presume I must first have read her work in high school, at least (and expectably) the short "Imagist" poems for which she was primarily known. Her intense, elusive edginess displaced me because I could not follow it as "thinking"—it was curiously emotions she offered. In any case, I found no attachment and when, some years later, Pound sent me an inscribed copy of By Avon River from St. Elizabeth's along with a flotsam of bulletins and journals relating to economics, agriculture and politics, again I paid little attention—frankly even less than I might have, just that Pound seemed so little interested despite its personal directive.

Therefore Robert Duncan's bringing the Trilogy with him to Mallorca in 1954 is really an introduction in all ways, because not only was the poet of that great poem new to me, as they say, but the whole place of such power (which was also Duncan's) had never been so vividly manifest. It was revelation in such articulate, tangible measure—a pace, extraordinarily specific, of feeling in literalizing sounds. I think now of:

I go where I love and am loved,
into the snow;

I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity;

I go where I belong, inexorably. . . .

It broke my heart with its mastery, its singular evocation of humanness.

Duncan noted the irony of the publication, the meager response, so that the first book is followed by two smaller, cheaper editions in paper only—it is wartime, no one is really hearing it, and Pound and Williams, likewise at the base of their own powers, singular, isolate, fighting for coherence and survival, seemingly have no consciousness of their heroic companion in the same place.

Then somewhat later, again thanks to Duncan, I was able to hear the recording she made for Norman Holmes Pearson (as Robert led me to understand) of parts of Helen of Egypt and that voice with its absolute sounding of each interval of word, each cadence, caught me entirely. She was the master of this art.

Much more recently, at a gathering committed to her honor, I was displaced by someone's proposing that we, as readers, need not finally be possessed by the visions so insistent in her work—as though we might rationally understand and yet avoid what so compelled her. I do not think so.