The Archive and the Alchemical Will: On Critics’ Historicism and Poets’ Vision in Two Recent Recoveries of H.D.’s and Pound’s Lost Writings

Annette Debo’s and Mark Byron’s new studies of H.D. and Ezra Pound, respectively, include the republication of rare materials or the first-time publication of archival notes and drafts dating from c. 1939–1945. Recent modernist studies’ archival turn, and the resultant focus on narrating authorial intention, can foster better appreciations of why and how these and other poets’ wartime and postwar works turn to visionary modes and esoteric theological sources in their attempts to fashion socially, culturally, and politically transformative poetics.