The H.D. Book
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
This magisterial work, long awaited and long the subject of passionate speculation, is an unprecedented exploration of modern poetry and poetics by one of America’s most acclaimed and influential postwar poets. What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan’s great work in the 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D., Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and many others, Duncan’s wide-ranging book is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism. Until now, The H.D. Book existed only in mostly out-of-print little magazines in which its chapters first appeared. Now, for the first time published in its entirety, as its author intended, this monumental work—at once an encyclopedia of modernism, a reinterpretation of its key players and texts, and a record of Duncan’s quest toward a new poetics—is at last complete and available to a wide audience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Duncan's (1919 1988) great meditation on modernism's last remaining question mark finally sees print. Published as the first volume in California's Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series, this lovingly prepared volume presents this long critical work, written in 1960 and 1961, in its full form for the first time. It brilliantly reconstructs the dynamics of Pound, Williams, and H.D.'s complex, charged, evolving poet relations, and of H.D.'s eventual departure from the modernist mainstream into a classicism that exasperated Williams, but clearly fascinates Duncan. It reveals Duncan's own poetic relationship to H.D., with whom he corresponded late in the latter poet's life. It tracks a canonical murder, by which critics (beginning with Randall Jarrell) systematically exclude H.D. from the modernist pantheon. And it shows Duncan, whose great longer works lay ahead of him, struggling to find a poetic kernel within H.D.'s oeuvre. While this book is staged as an elaborate defense of H.D.'s work, and especially her austere and archaic-seeming late poetry, it is best read as the daybook of a poet as he absorbs, thinks through, departs from, returns to, and loves a major antecedent.
