Books You Should Be Reading But Aren't: Trilogy

Yes, HD. So hard to find in a bookstore, so enjoyable to read. For those of you who do not know, HD stands for Hilda Doolittle, who was brought to us by Ezra Pound (Imagiste!). As one of the few female Imagist poets, she stands out. Her brief lyricism is decidedly more feminine than the lines of her male contemporaries (i.e. Eliot, Pound). It was mostly her earlier work that garnered the Imagist label (it's said that the label was invented by Pound to market her work), and by the thirties and forties she had moved on to work that is rarely specifically defined, but is broadly modernist. At the penning of Trilogy (in England during the second World War) she worked with varying mythologies and history to write effective war poetry which has the ability to be violent but is softened by romantic phrasing.


The tenth poem of the first section of trilogy, "The Walls Do Not Fall"

But we fight for life,
we fight, they say, for breath,

so what good are your scribblings?
this--we take them with us

beyond death: Mercury, Hermes, Thoth
invented the script, letters, palette;

they indicated flute or lyre-notes
on papyrus or parchment

are magic indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere,

forever; remember, O Sword,
you are the younger brother, the latter born

your Triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over

in the beginning
was the Word.

HD's poetic signature in Trilogy was her couplet (though not a heroic or rhymed couplet, perhaps extending from the Imagistic idea that "the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms...a new cadence means a new idea." (Some Imagist Poets, 1916)). Her later work was influenced by DH Lawrence, so the motives became more grandiose and less pointed, often making the work more difficult (and less read). Trilogy is a journey that is not linear, but rather jumps back and forth through times and cultures to make large statements about war, the written word, and our place in all of these things.

For more information on Imagism and their tenets, go here (a really good read by Amy Lowell), and for more information about HD's sordid, Freud-filled life, go here.