"Ancient Wisdom" to "Supreme Fiction": Ideas of God in the Poetry of H.D. and Wallace Stevens (Hilda Doolittle‪)‬

Introduction As searchers in a 20th century of world war and social upheaval, the American modernist poets H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Wallace Stevens revised poetry's visionary tradition for a skeptical era by re-imagining the idea of God. The visionary poetics of H.D. and Stevens extends a tradition that includes William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. H.D. and Stevens neither embrace conventional religion, as T.S. Eliot eventually does, nor reject abstractions of the spirit, as William Carlos Williams does in calling the poem "a machine made out of words." (1) Instead, they evolve new poetries of the secular-sacred, inscribing themselves not as prophets of "transcendent forms" but as self-conscious artists whose "actual" words blaze with an art, or artifice, that can redeem the human spirit. (2) H.D. looks back to ancient myths, reclaiming but also revising female divinity in transgressive terms. Stevens re-conceptualizes poetry itself as a modern form of redemption. In bodies of work created through the mid-century (Stevens died in 1955; H.D., in 1961), they demonstrate poetry's capacity to redeem the human spirit singed by historical disasters and existential alienation. Their distinctive inward quests lead to discoveries of the other within themselves; then to something larger beyond themselves, an encompassing being or sense of being that may be considered an idea of god. (3) In the 21st century search for global accord amid perpetual war and ecological crisis, the work of H.D. and Stevens confirms the power of visionary poetry as a spiritual force for creating common ground. It demonstrates poetry's effectiveness as a catalyst for compassionate dialogue across religious divides that are used to fuel global conflict.