Hilda Doolittle's emergence on the pages of Poetry magazine in 1913 as "H. D., Imagiste" heralded the beginnings of a writer whose canon spans half a century and the genres of poetry, fiction, memoir, essay, drama, and translation. This achievement was firmly rooted in H. D.'s central participation in the imagist movement, a short-lived moment in literary history, but one whose experiments changed the course of modern poetry with its concept of the "image" and its advocacy of vers libre. (p. 1)
Sea Garden, published in 1916, was the poet's culmination of her early apprenticeship in London, and it won for her the reputation of being the best of the imagist poets. Her poems avoided the vague moralizing and sentimental mythologizing that the imagists deplored in much of the "cosmic" poetry of the late nineteenth century. They were crisp, precise, and absolutely without excess. The imagist emphasis on hard, classical lines, however, did not mean that the poems were without emotion. Most imagist poems rely heavily on precisely delineated objects from nature to embody subjective experience. But as poems like "Heat" and "Oread" demonstrate vividly, H. D.'s imagist poetry was not a form of nature poetry adapted to the modern world. The essence of the imagist task was to locate the "image" that incarnated an "intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time"—or, to use T. S. Eliot's later term, the "objective correlative" of subjective experience. In Sea Garden, H. D. fulfilled that task by rendering intense passions and perceptions in images that originated in her visits to Cornwall and her American childhood…. The mythological personae that appear in many of her poems did not represent an escapist attempt to return to ancient Greece, but rather served as personal metaphors or masks that allowed her to distance intense emotion sufficiently for artistic expression.
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