The author hereby certifies that the extensive use of any copyrighted material in the manuscript is with the written permission of the copyright owner, and will waive and hold harmless University Microfilm from any damages which may arise from copyright violations. THE CLASSICAL WORLD OF H. D. By THOMAS BURNETT SWANN, JR. A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA August, 1%0 "I go where I love and where I am loved: Into the snow." H. D. ACKN0WI£DGMEOT5 I wish to express my deepest appreciation to Frederick William Conner, whose patient and perceptive guidance has made this study possible. I am also indebted to Thomas Walter Herbert, Thomas Pyles, Edwin Capers Kirkland, and Frank Van Deren Coke for serving on my com- mittee; to Norman Holmes Pearson for several helpful letters; and finally, to H. D. herself, who supplied me with valuable details about her life and poems. ill TABLE OF CONTENTS CHATTER PAGE I H. D.'s Classical Background 1 II H. D. and the Twentieth Century 34 in Heroines, Mortal and Divine 52 IV Heroes, Mortal and Divine ....... 99 V H. D. and Sappho. 133 VI Settings 1^6 VII Palimpsest, Part 1 163 Vin Hippolytus Temporizes 173 IX Hedylus 184 X The Hedgehog . 196 XI The World War II Trilogy 204 XII H. D.'s Significance 215 Bibliography. .......... ... 224 Biographical Sketch 231 iv CHAPTER I H. D. *S CLASSICAL BACKGROUND Hilda Doolittle—H. D. —has been called an inspired anachronism, a Greek reborn into modern times. No recent poet, perhaps, has been more indebted to Euripides, Sappho, Homer, the Greek Anthology , and 1 other classical models. But H. D. has sifted idle classical world through a modern imagination. A few of her poems could pass for the work of ancient authors, but most are uniquely her own, and the sum of her antique writings—poems, play, juvenile, and two novels—is by no means classical. The purpose of this study is to show where H. D. has simply borrowed from the Greeks and Romans and where she has, by an artful selection and transformation, revealed the bias of a sensitive and reclusive modern woman. Such an examination will support, I think, this general truth: she has escaped from her own world into antiquity, but even in her escape she is not content; even among the metopes and cornices of Athens and Sparta, she wishes to escape yet further, beyond the last ridge of hills, beyond Olympus itself. Her mountains thrust up- ward not to be explored but to offer flight. Her women demand equality with men only to renounce than. Her gods, weary of prayers and festivals, fly to the pine forest or the glacier; they love and hate, toil and V "classical" I refer to the whole world of Greece and Rome, not to that specific period of about 450-323 B.C. which art historians take to be the Classical period of Greek art. In H. D.*s case, the emphasis is largely cm Greece rather than Rcsne, though we shall see that Palimpsest, Part I, is laid in Rome. 1 2 conquer; but always retreat lies foremost in their minds, retreat from each other and from the city which, like a threatening Sphinx, hunches behind them. Renunciation is the unifying theme of H. D. *s world, renunciation as typified in Artemis, goddess of the woods, but we must be careful not to follow the example of imperceptive critics and characterize this world as "desiccated, dead, a wire-jerked munrny. ..." In H. D., re- nunciation may become fiercely passionate, and the very fierceness with which she renounces human entanglements implies her deep sensitivity. Though choosing strange disguises, goddesses, enchantresses, even young warriors, she can only in part conceal her painful vulnerability to the beauty which Elinor Wylie described as having "the hard heart of a child, "3 the beauty which is all the more dangerous when embodied in human form. It is true that images of ice and snow abound in H. D.'s world, and some- times, to be sure, they threaten to extinguish the last human fires (as in Hedylus ). But her more successful works are those in which icy fervor is the distinguishing characteristic; those which, like dry ice, burn even while they seem to chill. If the primary aim of this study is to describe H. D.*s use of classical materials, the secondary aim is to remedy the critical misconception that she has achieved a narrow, marble perfection, faultless in form but without real vitality. 2 "Turtle and Mock-Turtle," The Hew Statesman , XXIII (August, 1924), 572 ^ Collected Poems ( Mew York, 1954), p. 3. 3 My second chapter, hy relating H. D. to her contemporaries and by- sketching the details of her life, will attempt to explain why she re- turned to the Greeks. Heroines and heroes, both mortal and divine, are the concern of my third and fourth chapters, while my fifth deals with H. D, *s variations on Sappho, and ny sixth with settings. The poems considered in Chapters III, IV, V, and VI are those appearing in Col- lected Poems (1925) and Red Roses for Bronze (l93l)> with the addition of four poems not published until the late thirties. Subsequent chapters will examine four longer narrative and dramatic works, Palimpsest (1926) Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), Hedylus (1928), and The Hedgehog (1936). Chapter XI considers the World War II trilogy (19*&, 19^5, 19**6)> and the study closes with an evaluation of H. D.'s significance for the reader. Since I am unqualified to consider H. D. as a translator, I have limited my study to her original works, though I shall draw occa- sionally from the notes to her translations. Since I am concerned with her classical world alone, not the entire body of her work, I shall refer only incidentally to her books not of Greek and Raman inspiration: By Avon River (19*19) ) poems and brief essays shout Shakespeare and his con- temporaries; Tribute to Freud (1956), a record of her psychoanalysis by the great professor; and her most recent book. Bid Me to Live (i960), an autobiographical novel about London in the First World War. Before we may approach H. D. herself, however, it is necessary to do two things: first, we must glance at the ancient writers who gave her subjects, scenes, and characters; second, we must consider the nine- teenth century classical tradition into which she was born, a tradition 4 which both enriched and diluted the inspiration of antiquity. The remainder of this chapter concerns itself with these two tasks. H. D.'s debt to Greek and Roman writers is apparent even from the table of contents in Collected Poems (a volume which combines Sea Garden [1916], Hymen [1921], and Iiellodora 11924]). Of the eighty-nine poems listed, thirty-five have an unmistakable classical reference in their titles. "Adonis," "Pygmalion," "Demeter," "Thetis" (twice), "Heliodora,” "fhaedra," and "Telesila," to mention only a few, name characters from Greek mythology or history; and a look at the poems themself es informs us that, unlike Joyce's Ulysses, they refer to Greek originals and not modern counterparts. Whether, like Adonis, the characters are addressed by the poet or whether, like Demeter, they are monologists telling their own stories, they inhabit the antique world. Many of the poems not localized by their titles are established in a classical background by allusions or images. In "The Look-Out," for example, the helmsman identifies himself as Lyncaeus, one of the Argo- nauts. In "Telesila" the heroine alludes to a Spartan attack on Argos in the fifth century B. C., and the heroine of Palimpsest, though H. D.'s invention, is called the daughter of Crates, the Cynic philosopher, and his wife Hipparchia. In "The Contest" images of cropped hair, a twisted head-band of gold, and a crown of myrtle recall the Greek ath- letes immortalized by Myron aid Polycleitus. When "Prisoners" speaks of a hero having attended a banquet with a hyacinth-circlet around his head, we recall the ancient Greek custom whereby slaves greeted guests with chaplets of hyacinths as they entered from the dusty street. 5 "Loss” describes a young man with shoulder-strap, shorn locks, wrought greaves, and a tunic; where one or two of the details could apply to a Saracen, a Crusader, or even a G. I. with a crew-cut, the accumulation of details identifies a Greek or Roman, From what ancient writers did H. D. draw her inspiration? In later parts of this study, we shall examine her models in specific detail, but here we may mention the more important in passing. Euripides deserves first place. H. D. translated choruses from his Iphigeneia at Aulis , Bacchae , and Hecuba, and she translated, in 1937 > aa entire play, his Ion (and in her introduction classed him with Aeschylus and Sophocles as one of the world’s three greatest dramatists). She wrote an original verse play, Hippolytus Temporizes, on the subject he had treated in his Hippolyfcus , and four of her short poems, "Phaedra," "Hippolytus Temporizes," "She Rebukes Hippolyta," and "She Contrasts Herself with Hippolyta," describe characters who appear in Hippolytus . Homer also gave her subjects. She translated a selection from the Odyssey about Athene, and she treated several prominent Homeric heroines, Circe, Calypso (which she sometimes spells "Callypso"), Thetis, Helen, and Cassandra, in original poems. In addition to supplying her with heroines, it was Horner who helped to crystallize the entire Olympian stage of Greek religion which has so profoundly influenced English and American poets including H.