“Yet the frame held”: Poetic Form and the Bombing of London during World War II

“[T]he bone-frame was made for / no such shock knit within terror”: the first poem in H.D.’s The Walls Do Not Fall equates the human body to a bombed building, the word “ frame” encapsulating the mutual implication of urban, human, and poetic structures in H.D.’s wartime poetry. In the writing of poets living and working in London during World War II, the civilian experience of war is not merely documented and alluded to; the Blitz also provides a pressing material reference to architectural metaphors used to figure poetic form. In the context of a number of wartime publications, civilian records, and postwar lyric theory, H.D’s and T.S. Eliot’s wartime works emerge as engaging with a number of such formal implications: the dissolution of architectural structures, the navigability of fragmented urban topographies, and patterns of continuity in the face of violently disrupted routines.