H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (review)

Like many scholars of my generation, I came to the poet H.D. by way of her prose and in the context of French feminisms. For graduate students in the eighties, H.D. was the exemplar of l’écriture feminine, her newly published autobiographical texts the ideal objects for our theoretical inquiries. Her classicism was, generally, “bracketed off.” Our postmodernist roads led more often to Paris than to Rome or Athens.

For this reason I find Eileen Gregory’s H.D. and Hellenism simultaneously illuminating and frustrating as she establishes a more traditional context for H.D.—the “Classic Lines” of dissemination that include the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century readings of ancient texts by Pater, Pound, and Eliot.

The strength of this study is its attention to this tradition, the patrilineal transmission of H.D.’s hellenism. While the author situates the poet “in oblique and marginal territory” with respect to the classics, it is classical territory nonetheless. Gregory argues that H.D. engaged constantly with texts that had come to embody patriarchal cultural authority and that she met them on those terms, with both defiance and reverence. The author’s tone is similarly mixed. Her examination of H.D.’s “keen-edged heterodoxy, rebelliousness, and surprising strangeness” is itself often edgy, insightful, and surprising, and she makes fascinating connections among decadent romanticism, ancient religion via anthropology, and H.D.’s eroticism that benefit from careful formalist and new historicist practices. This study fills gaps that my postmodernist readings as a graduate student could not account for, particularly in its close attention, in the later chapters and in the appendix, to H.D.’s “literary subtexts” in Euripides.

On the other hand, Gregory’s underlying resistance to contemporary readings of H.D. inflects this work. She claims, disingenuously, to be accounting for H.D.’s hellenism “as [H.D.] herself figures and articulates it,” without “any specific theoretical construct.” Her critical orientation, she says, is eclectic, and her interpretive models “provisional and local.” But the critic’s attention to sources and influences, to “language, image and theme,” places her in a theoretical context she would have done better to own. And her repeated dismissal of postmodernist feminist readings of H.D.’s classicism as only reductive explorations of subjectivity is less than generous, particularly considering that these readings are the source of the heightened interest in H.D. that made fertile ground for her book.

That aside, this is unquestionably a thorough and impressive examination of H.D.’s classicism, and it demonstrates strongly that critics ignore the centrality of Greece in H.D.’s writing to their detriment. Clearly, H.D. involved herself in a lifelong (and life-giving) revision of ancient myths. And Gregory makes the case for the pivotal place of these concerns in any study of H.D.’s work. From the perspective of this book, roads that lead elsewhere are divergences and detours.