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Abstract

Partant d’une analyse du couple conceptuel modernisme/postmodernisme, cet article confronte de manière inédite H.D. et Rae Armantrout, deux poètes des extrêmes, au sens où elles s’inscrivent à la marge, respectivement dans les avant-gardes du début des XXe et XXIe siècles, dessinant ainsi les frontières temporelles de la tradition poétique moderniste américaine. La comparaison de ces deux auteurs de poèmes comme de textes en prose révèle une commune atypicité, une profonde singularité qui n’aura pas été sans déconcerter leurs contemporains. Elle vise, de surcroît, à nuancer la supposée rupture entre les deux modes (post/moderniste), ligne de démarcation qui fait toujours l’objet de controverses parmi les critiques. Il s’agit de montrer quelles relations H.D. et Rae Armantrout entretiennent avec des problématiques communes, comme celle de la transcendance, celle des mouvements d’avant-garde qui tendent à enfermer les individus dans des groupes tels que l’Imagisme ou la “Language Poetry”, ou encore celle des techniques expérimentales, impliquant par exemple le recours à l’intertextualité ou à l’hypertextualité, moyens leur permettant d’explorer leurs propres modes d’accès à la connaissance dans un Zeitgeist donné. D’abord de nature épistémologique, leur quête commune est fondée sur une position éthique définissant leur rapport au langage poétique et aux possibilités de produire du sens.

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1H.D. and Rae Armantrout are two poets whose production marks the chronological limits of the American avant-garde. More specifically, their works signal the transition from early modernism to current postmodernist poetry. Any discussion focusing on American avant-garde poetry from the beginning of the twentieth century to this day must therefore deal with such a shift and account for its complex and much debated nature. This is the most plausible conclusion after the examining such seminal critical works as Hasan’s classical list of oppositions (267-268), as well as key recent studies emphasizing either a coherent relation (Ashton) or a clear rupture (Blasing) between those two aesthetic movements. In her article “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism”, Susan Stanford Friedman emphasizes the academic dilemma that this topic poses to scholars (493-513). Through a figure of experimental poetry, parataxis, Friedman shows to what extent the term Modernism has come to mean one thing and its opposite: chaos and order, radicalism and cohesion, realism and idealism, rejection and adoption of master narratives, fragmentation and linearity (495-497). Accordingly, a comparative study of two major figures of modernist and postmodernist poetry—H.D. and Rae Armantrout—must bear in mind the difficulty of starting from a clear-cut definition.

2If we were asked to list, following Hasan’s model, the main features tying H.D.’s or Armantrout’s works to the American avant-garde, a provisional result could be as follows:

H.D. (modernism)

Rae Armantrout (postmodernism)

Cosmopolitism (American expatriate in Europe)

Localism (American suburbia: global turned local)

Bourgeois, intellectual background (Moravian community)

Working-class background (Methodist Fundamentalist mother)

Classical sources, especially Greek, also the Bible and ancient cultures

Popular sources: media, conversations

Transcendence: “a sense of beyond”

Metaphysics within everyday life

Psychoanalysis & creative power

Thought-in-progress technique

Evolution from Imagism (short poem) to long, lyric-epic poems

Evolution from Language Poetry (short poems) to “the vertical anti-lyric

3All the thoughts laid out in this article on H.D. and Rae Armantrout will be based on the parameters established in the list. At first sight, certain items may seem mere objective facts. A closer look, however, will reveal unexpected details. H.D.’s condition as an American expatriate, in Switzerland and in London or traveling throughout Europe with her life-long companion, Bryher, aligns her with most major American authors of her time: Eliot, Pound, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, among others. However, close readings and translations of H.D’s work have given evidence of the “Americanness” of her poetic images, in contrast to voices who put the emphasis on the “internationalism” of her work. Marina Camboni (571-578), who translated Trilogy into Italian, namely highlights the influence of Dickinson and Hawthorne on the poem. She also points at the Bible as a major source: “In American literature especially, from the beginning, the Bible played a major linguistic and representational function” (576). This seems in consonance with H.D.’s upbringing, described in her autobiographical volume The Gift (1969), where we learn that her family belonged to the Moravian religious community. Furthermore, she depicts the intellectual atmosphere that she was surrounded with, as her father was an astronomer, her mother a painter and a musician, her grandfather a botanist. Critics have analyzed these facts in order to explore the visionary quality of H.D.’s poetry (Mandel 301-317).

4In contrast, when Rae Armantrout chose her path of life, the result was quite different. After attending Berkeley in the 1970s and taking part in the Language Poetry movement, she decided to go back to her native town. Her decision seemed coherent with a world in which the local was becoming global, and vice versa (Guy 1-16). In her childhood and youth memoirs, True (1998), Armantrout described her upbringing in a working-class suburb of California as an environment devoid of any cultural stimuli. In one sense, though, her early memories match those of H.D.’s: both were raised on the Bible––Armantrout’s mother was a Methodist––and the Bible certainly constitutes the origin of American literature in the prophetic sense it is given to the birth of the American nation (Patea 15-43).

5The ways H.D. and Armantrout incorporate religion into the avant-garde credo, however, differ significantly. On the one hand, H.D. subverts the mechanisms of her inherited patriarchal religion, by borrowing its visual props and applying them to contexts born from her own imaginative and visionary talents. On the other hand, Armantrout uses the same religious symbols and imagery in order to emphasize their uselessness within a suburban scenario. Where H.D. proposes an alternative path towards transcendence, Armantrout simply exposes the lack of transcendence. This can be observed in H.D.’s Trilogy, on the one hand, and in Armantrout’s Next Life, on the other.

6Published between 1944 and 1946, Trilogy is a long poem in three parts inspired by the context of devastation of the Second World War. At the beginning of section 20 from The Walls Do Not Fall, the first part of Trilogy, H.D. writes:

Now it appears very clear
that the Holy Ghost,

childhood’s mysterious enigma,
is the Dream;

that way of inspiration
is always open,

and open to everyone;
it acts as a go-between, interpreter,

it explains symbols of the past
in to-day’s imagery,

it merges the distant future
with most distant antiquity,

states economically
in a simple dream-equation

the most profound philosophy,
discloses the alchemist’s secret

and follows the Mage
in the desert (Trilogy 29)

7Trilogy is a fundamental work among H.D.’s mature writings. The unadorned avant-gardism of her early short poems has gradually given way to long poems of epic proportions and ambitious cultural scope. In previous sections of the book, H.D. signaled the “Presence” of a God-Father figure (Ra, Osiris, Amen), who becomes manifest in an empty temple. According to the Biblical myth of the Trinity, God is made of three beings: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. H.D. subverts the order by placing the Holy Ghost as an intermediary––a subsidiary role traditionally bestowed upon the Virgin Mary––and she also changes its symbolic attributions; thus, the Holy Ghost becomes the inspiration for creativity. Besides, in H.D.’s version, he becomes the translator of past symbols and imagery into contemporary language.

  • 1 For the feminist implications of H.D.’s poetry and prose, see, among other classical studies, Susan (...)

8After this section, the Holy Ghost will not resurface until the second part of the poem, Tribute to the Angels (section 36), where he precedes and announces the third element in the Trinity; surprisingly enough, this third agent is not the Son, but a Lady associated with many illustrious predecessors: Venus, Astarte, Bona Dea. The main task of the Lady is to dissolve old prejudices: “this is the new Eve who comes//clearly to return, to retrieve/ what she lost the race,//given over to sin, to death;/she brings the Book of Life, obviously” (Trilogy 101). The change of character (from Son to Lady) and the empowerment of the female figure through her new attributes (she is carrying a book instead of a child) are clearly intentional. As a woman, H.D. acts in accordance with the new era of modernity1; a time when “the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity”; and when “even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (Bhabha 2396). In Trilogy, H.D. takes on the role of the poet-prophetess. Her artistic and personal past has led her to evolve an utterly personal interpretation of tradition and religion. Christianity is given a strong prophetic quality, probably unseen in English since William Blake. The main difference with Blake, however, is that this time the voice able to speak and reinvent the tradition is female. Moreover, where Blake offered a parallel religious universe peopled with his own inventions, H.D. offers almost nothing: “the unwritten volume of the new” (Trilogy 103).

9Sixty years after the publication of Trilogy, Armantrout’s poem “Two, Three”, from her book Next Life (2007), offers its own version of the Trinity mystery:

Sad, fat boy in pirate hat.
Long, old, dented,
copper-colored Ford.

How many traits
must a thing have
in order to be singular?

(Echo persuades us
everything we say
has been said at least once
                                            before.)

Two plump, bald men
in gray tee-shirts
and tan shorts

are walking a small bulldog –
followed by the eyes
of an invisible third person.

The Trinity was born
from what we know
of the bitter

symbiosis of couples.
Can we reduce echo’s sadness
by synchronizing our speeches?

Is it the beginning or end
of real love
when we pity a person

because, in him,
we see ourselves?

10Like most of Armantrout’s poems, “Two, Three” lends itself neither to a single nor to an easy interpretation. The title is problematic, not to mention the concept of the Trinity itself. The biblical Trinity explicitly mentioned in the sixth stanza does not seem to be embodied by any of the characters in the poem. Underneath the apparent aimlessness of the poem, Armantrout seems to be speaking about (Christian) empathy; about the act of watching as “an invisible third person” (“me, I suppose”, she quips in an interview with Lynn Keller in 2009); and/or about the impossibility to speak about transcendence. Yet the poem could also be read from the attributions that H.D. confers to the Holy Ghost in Trilogy: “it explains the symbols of the past/in to-day’s imagery” (29). In Armantrout’s imagery, however, symbols are blurry and inaccurate. Furthermore, the two bald men walking a dog may be perceived as a gay couple. Their similar apparel almost calls for the voyeurism of that “third person”, the beholder. Thus, when the poet compares herself with the Trinity, she is somehow “queering” the trinity, turning the Father/Son duality into a kind of gay couple. In this sense, the poem’s reference to religion provides a risky, irreverent and ultimately heretical meaning.

11Armantrout’s method of composition could be regarded as a direct continuation of the new model epitomized by H.D.’s Lady and her blank book. Before depicting the Lady in white, H.D. guides the reader of Trilogy through the images of the famous madonnas painted by Raphael and Leonardo. In her rendering of these mother figures, she admires but rejects at the same time their passive beauty. Once she gets rid of the burden of these inherited visual traditions, the poet-prophet is free to build her own symbols. She proceeds by eliminating profusion, and resorts to simplicity through intertextuality. Thus, in section 32 of Tribute to the Angels she writes:

For I can say truthfully,
her veils were white as snow,

so that no fuller on earth
can white them
; I can say

she looked beautiful, she looked lovely,
she was clothed with a garment

down to the foot, but it was not
girt about with a golden girdle (Trilogy 97)

12H.D. is freely using the references to the transfiguration of Christ, which can be found in the Gospels and in the Book of Revelation. Through them, she depicts her own vision of the Lady, with no girt, no ties of any sort. Yet, she is fully conscious of the uncertainty of her task. Unlike the bards of ancient times, she does not speak out of authority, but from the hesitant mood modernity imposes upon artists, as we read in section 40 of Tribute to the Angels: “what I mean is – it is so simple//yet no trick of the pen or brush/could capture that impression”. In this way, she is at the same time rejecting traditional views of the female figure in religion, and re-gendering the whole religious patriarchal narrative. H.D. stops here, at the male-female turn; but Rae Armantrout goes further in her turn-of-the-screw strategy, as her re-gendering process addresses the gay community.

13H.D.’s evolution, from the narrow-minded vanguard to a visionary interpretation of modernity, owes as much to classical sources and religion as to her psychological development. She calls her own vital and artistic evolution “spiritual realism”. Following this self-coined concept, H.D. behaves like an “initiate” in the Eleusinian mysteries. She states that she has been able to integrate in her own self the three stages that the ancient female ritual involved: the passion of the body, the detachment of the intellect and the mystery of the spirit (Carbajosa 2008, 15). Only this triple operation accounts for the reintegration of the self as a human, artistic and transcendent entity. A convincing ethical stance is thus taken here.

14Indeed, H.D. turns psychoanalysis and creative powers into enabling allies. Writing in the post-structuralist era, Armantrout prefers to show the workings of her alert mind. She exerts what her fellow writer Ron Silliman has called “the vertical anti-lyric”. In Silliman’s words, she writes “poems that at first glance appear contained and perhaps even simple, but which upon the slightest examination rapidly provoke a sort of vertigo effect as element after element begins to spin wildly toward more radical (and, often enough, sinister) possibilities” (ix). Where H.D. uses the power of the subconscious, then, Armantrout proceeds quite consciously and with a clear ethical view, although this is not equivalent to clarity and explicitness in her poems. She does not openly expose the banality of our times with the triumph of massive consumerism; Dickinson’s “tell it slant” is preferred. In fact, the well-known Dickinsonian line acquires, in Armantrout’s poetry, a curious quality: “I want my poems to move at the speed of thought, to have the immediacy and urgency of real-time thought … And what about the reader? I’d like her to participate in/at the inception of experience, if possible––not just to hear an after the fact report. As an experience coalesces, we aren’t telling ourselves where we are” (Elshstain 2007, 95).

15Moreover, where H.D. employs intertextuality, Armantrout seems to resort to hypertextuality. In order to shift the focus from one strategy to the other, Riffaterre’s definition of hypertextuality is enlightening here: “the use of the computer to transcend the linearity of the written text by building an endless series of imagined connections, from verbal associations to possible worlds, extending the glosses or marginalia from the footnotes of yesteryear to metatexts” (780). As already mentioned, H.D.’s intertextual technique is akin to a palimpsest. She operates by eliminating layer after layer of surface levels until she lets the deepest level emerge: the white Lady below the profusion of madonnas and God-father figures is the end of the thread, displayed––in reverse order––from full consciousness to the deepest part of the subconscious. Visually, this operation is a linear one. In Armantrout, however, the exercise of multi-referencing is simultaneous, and may take different readers to varied or even opposing “sites” at the same time.

16Furthermore, H.D.’s poetry responds to a Western, highbrow cultural milieu which, although it was starting to become multiple and fragmentary through the impulse of mass sub-culture, could still be considered as a whole. Armantrout’s poetry, in contrast, faces multi-referential, information overburdened and dispersed societies. Intertextuality as practiced by modernists is no longer possible because the cultural background is no longer unique. This can be observed in another poem from Next Life:

           YOOHOO

Sun lights up a pelt
of dust on the receiver.

Being unexpected,
this is a kind of call.

Cross names out
and things are all made up

of contrary, percussive,
adjectival tugs.

I remember someone
wrestled an angel,

                   a signal.

  • 2 Another interpretation of this term has been explicitly given by the poet in an informal conversati (...)

17The title picks up on a colloquial, informal way of signaling one’s presence, calling for attention. In an American context, it also unavoidably brings up the popular beverage of the same name, in a clear hint at pop culture. From the first two couplets we learn about a kind of metaphoric “call”, that is, “a pelt of dust” signaled by the sun on the telephone. A technological device is thus turned into a receiver for an unknown form of communication. It anticipates, in a way, the unexpectedness of the word “angel” a few lines below. Between both extremes, we find a strange allusion to language––how to reconcile “adjectival” with “tugs”, which, in its turn, reminds us of “tags”, i.e. the used speech that denotes mental laziness?2 Afterwards, the first “I” of the poem appears, introducing another incongruent semantic series of Biblical echoes (“wrestle”, “angel”, “signal”). But the real trial comes with the second stanza, juxtaposed to the first one below an asterisk:

The present’s chronic
revision

which a poem
re-enacts.

The open vowel
(peek-a-boo)
pelvis

through which you
“came into this world”
            sits on the shelf

in a mausoleum
now,

world on either side of it

18The onomatopoeic “Yoohoo” of the title finds its complement in the “peek-a-boo” here: it is evident that the poet is sending signals to the world out there, asking about the mystery of birth. Likewise, we find references to death; the conduct for birth (the pelvis) is a “mausoleum now”, that is, open on both ends (“world on either side of it”). So the Bible is definitely present in this poem as well, but in ways much more indirect and heterodox than in H.D’s. We cannot decode meaning here through intertextuality, but through hypertextuality.

19Thanks to these experimental procedures, both H.D. and Rae Armantrout explore the ethical implications of their poetic praxis. For them, avant-gardism is not simply an aesthetic response to the artistic impulses and demands available in their time, but a conscious search for the poetic language that can address the fundamental quests of life without sounding worn-out or deceitful. If they differ in their forms, means and even ideological starting points, they coincide in the way they interact with the traditions available, and for similar purposes. This can be observed in their prose writings as well.

  • 3 1919 was a critical year in H.D.’s life: the time when she definitely came out of the material and (...)

20H.D. was a prolific writer of semi-autobiographical novels. But she also wrote a short essay, Notes on Thought and Vision, published as early as 19193, in which she reflects more directly upon her method of composition. The essay is quite allusive, even visionary in style. It includes a key concept for the comprehension of her work, that of the “overmind”. Albert Gelpi identifies, in the preface to this essay, the influences on this concept:

“Over-mind” has a Nietzschean, elitist ring, but it is, at least theoretically, “there for everyone”, however few actually aspire to attain it. And if it also sounds like Emerson’s Oversoul, its more immediate source is the Moravian pietism of H.D.’s mother’s family. (12)

21H.D. affirms in the text that “over-mind seems a cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is like a closed sea-plant, jelly-fish or anemone” (18-19). She deploys images of the natural world in order to convey her own version of Pound’s “make it new” axiom. She is quite certain that her task consists in overcoming “the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts” (24). Her poetic/prophetic discourse, based fundamentally on vision, opens alternative courses for future experimentation in poetry.

22Armantrout’s criticism deals mainly with the ambivalent issue of her inclusion in the Language Poetry movement of the 1970s. In her interviews she also discusses the nature of her poetry. Asked about the sliding issue of transcendence in her poems, she answers as follows:

Experience feels somehow incomplete to me. I sense that it feels that way to most other people as well. That could be what’s worst or best about humans. We always think there must be something more, something else. That’s why my poems sometimes end suddenly, perhaps without punctuation, certainly without a sense of true conclusion. They are leaning out into what’s missing (Carbajosa 2012, 5).

23As in H.D.’s example, Armantrout’s statements easily align her with her generation peers––the Language Poets––with whom she has fairly recently cofounded and developed ambitious poetic projects like “The Grand Piano”4. If, in the poetry and thought of H.D., the key concept is vision within the general term of modernism, in the case of Rae Armantrout, the main term “Language Poetry” involves personal excursions towards the use of language and reference; derivations that may well end on the banks of Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor and the phenomenology of language.

24Armantrout seems to accept and reject the common label of Language Poetry, i.e. language-oriented poetry, for sound reasons. In “Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?” (13-15), she admits the detachment she and other poets establish with concepts like metaphor and reference, but she also argues the following:

I use that term but I’m suspicious of it, finally, because it seems to imply division between language and experience, thought and feeling, inner and outer. The work I like best sees itself and sees the world … The writers I like are surprising, revelatory. They bring the underlying structures of language/thought into consciousness. They spurn the facile. Though they generally don’t believe in the Truth, they are scrupulously honest about the way word relates to word, sentence to sentence (15).

25Armantrout and the rest of the Language Poets work in the line of phenomenological philosophy, which primarily conceives of the imagination as a dimension of language (Zalipour 100-119), and of the metaphor as its central figure. In relation to this, Ricoeur establishes the difference between “meaning” and “reference”, where meaning points to the relation of language with the real world and reference to the relations of signs within language (107-108). In literature, where language is not subject to the impositions of the outer world, the choice of one or several possible meanings is open to the reader, but reference is always preserved.

26Nevertheless, the main objection that critics unfavorable to Language Poetry usually make is that all sense is missed. “Sense”, or “meaning”, is thus equivocally used instead of “reference”, normally in relation with metaphor. Celebrated critic Marjorie Perloff tries to untangle the knot:

A frequent objection of poetry mainstream criticism is that, without some measure of representation––the mirror held to nature, to social custom and the “march of events”––the poetic texts becomes meaningless. But it is reference, not representation, that we cannot do without: words, after all, must point to something, even if that something is only a small part of their structures of meaning (239).

27The predominance of reference over Hegelian representation––or over meaning, in phenomenological terms––may introduce an interesting debate that exceeds the limits of this article. For our purpose, however, it can be affirmed that such predominance very probably constitutes the most visible signal of the shift from modernism to postmodernism, as has been analyzed in the path taken from H.D. to Rae Armantrout.

28H.D.’s materialization of modernity, in the singularities of her poetry and prose, sometimes seems to be guessing at the thorough change in the human modes of knowledge that technology would eventually bring forth. She welcomes, for instance, the advent of cinema as an optimal source for the visionary: “Light takes a new attribute/ and yet his old/ glory/ enchants”, she writes in her poem “Projector” (Collected Poems 349). In it, the machine that prefigures postmodernity is compared with God Apollo.

29But in the case of Rae Armantrout, the cultural scenario she faces is evidently a different one. The weight of the virtual world, the simultaneity of discourses it allows and the new, unstable episteme it imposes are all present in her poetic praxis. The following lines from her poem “Integer”, included in her Pulitzer-awarded book Versed (2009), provide another meta-commentary on the topic:

Metaphor
is ritual sacrifice.
It kills the look-alike.
No,
metaphor is homeopathy.
A healthy cell
exhibits contact inhibition.

30These lines summarize the possible or multiple meanings for the symbol of poetry par excellence, the metaphor. But they may also be read as a declaration of principles, as doubtful and unfixed as any other. Or as the boundary of the mental contrast offered by the following part of the same poem: “These temporary credits/ will no longer be reflected/ in your next billing period”. Nothing is perdurable any more, the poem seems to echo. But predecessors like H.D. had already pointed to the same echo––almost a silence, but charged with expectations of meaning––of (un)perdurability, both within and beyond the very margins, equally imprecise, of modernity.

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Bibliography

Armantrout, Rae, Versed, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

-----, Next Life, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

-----, “True”, Collected Prose, San Diego, CA: Singing Horse Press, 2001, 134-168.

-----, “Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?”, Collected Prose, San Diego, CA: Singing Horse Press, 2001, 13-15.

Ashton, Jennifer, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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Blasing, Mutlu Moluk, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Camboni, Marina, “H.D.’s Trilogy and the Never-Ending Story of Translation”, Translating America: Importing, Translating, Misrepresenting, Mythizicing, Communicating America, M. Camboni, A. Carosso, S. Di Loreto, eds., Torino: Otto, 2010, 571-578.

Carbajosa, Natalia, “An Interview with Rae Armantrout”, Jotdown Contemporary Cultural Magazine 2012, <http://www.jotdown.es/2012/03/an-interview-to-rae-armantrout/>.

-----, “Prólogo”, H.D.: Trilogía, Barcelona: Lumen, 2008, 9-20.

Elshstain, Eric, & Matthias Regan. “An E-Mail Interview with Rae Armantrout”, Rae Armantrout: Collected Prose, San Diego, CA: Singing Horse Press, 2007, 86-102.

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-----, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Hasan, Ihab, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

H.D., The Gift, New York: New Directions, 1982.

-----, Notes on Thought and Vision, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982.

-----, “Projector” & “Projector II”, Collected Poems: 1912-1944, New York: New Directions, 1983, 349-358.

-----, Trilogy, New York: New Directions, 1998.

Keller, Lynn, “An Interview with Rae Armantrout”, Contemporary Literature 50 (2), 2009, 219-239.

Mandel, Charlotte, “Magical Lenses: Poet’s Vision Beyond the Naked Eye”, H.D. Woman and Poet, M. King, ed., Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1986, 301-317.

Patea, Viorica, “The Myth of the American Adam: A Reassessment”, Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam, V. Patea and M. E. Díaz, eds., Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 15-43.

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Notes

1 For the feminist implications of H.D.’s poetry and prose, see, among other classical studies, Susan Gubar’s “The Echoing Spell of H.D.’s Trilogy” (1978) and Susan S. Friedman’s Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction” (1990).

2 Another interpretation of this term has been explicitly given by the poet in an informal conversation: “by “tugs” I mainly meant “pulls”, which leads me to the pulling and pushing of wrestling and then to Jacob wrestling with the angel (for the right to ascend a ladder)”.

3 1919 was a critical year in H.D.’s life: the time when she definitely came out of the material and psychological anxieties caused by her break-up with Richard Aldington, a traumatic pregnancy and the loss of her father and brother, in order to take a new vital course in the company of Bryher.

4 See http://www.thegrandpiano.org/.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Natalia Carbajosa, Extremes of the Avant-garde: H.D. and Rae ArmantroutAnglophonia Caliban/Sigma, 35 | 2014, 85-100.

Electronic reference

Natalia Carbajosa, Extremes of the Avant-garde: H.D. and Rae ArmantroutAnglophonia Caliban/Sigma [Online], 35 | 2014, Online since 13 December 2013, connection on 16 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/acs/258; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.258

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