“At its best […] Imagist poetry is about […] the porous threshold between inner and outer, abstract and concrete, the intimate and the glitteringly impersonal” (McGuiness)
How does the liminal operate in H.D.’s “Garden” and “Eurydice”, and to what effect?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36399/GroundingsUG.11.169Keywords:
Hilda Doolittle, Poetry, Imagism, Garden, EurydiceAbstract
This essay proposes that the way H.D.’s poetry negotiates gender is possible by means of her liminal poetics. After discussing Turner’s concept of liminality and its pertinence to H.D., it will look at how her poetics can be considered liminal; simultaneous to evolving an understanding of what a liminal poetics might be. It will use Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text to argue that in “Garden” and “Eurydice”, H.D. disrupts the reader’s expectations of poetry—and thus attempts to disrupt their relations with the world.
References
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Burnett, Gary. “The Identity of H: Imagism and H.D.’s ‘Sea Garden’.” Sagetrieb 8, no. 3 (2009) https://sagetrieb.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/sagetrieb-8-3.
Collecott, Diane. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Collecott, Diane. “H.D.’s Transformative Poetics.” In The Cambridge Companion to H.D., edited by N. Christodoulides and P. Mackay, 51–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Culler, Jonathon D. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. New York: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Doolittle, Hilda. “Eurydice.” H.D. Selected Poems, edited by Louis L Marz, 36–37. London: Carcanet, 1925.
Doolittle, Hilda. “Garden.” H.D. Selected Poems, edited by Louis L Marz, 7. London: Carcanet, 1925.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets, 1880–1945, vol. 45. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983.
McGuiness, Patrick. “Imagism.” In A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, edited by D. Bradshaw and K. Dettmar, 183–188. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Prynne, J.H. English Poetry and Emphatical Language. London: British Academy, 1988.
Scott, Bonnie Kime. Joyce and Feminism. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process, Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Cornell University Press, 1966.
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