This magisterial work, long awaited and long the subject of passionate speculation, is an unprecedented exploration of modern poetry and poetics by one of America’s most acclaimed and influential postwar poets. What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan’s great work in the 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D., Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and many others, Duncan’s wide-ranging book is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism. Until now, The H.D. Book existed only in mostly out-of-print little magazines in which its chapters first appeared. Now, for the first time published in its entirety, as its author intended, this monumental work—at once an encyclopedia of modernism, a reinterpretation of its key players and texts, and a record of Duncan’s quest toward a new poetics—is at last complete and available to a wide audience.
The H.D. Book
About the Book
Reviews
“Published as the first volume in California's Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series, this lovingly prepared volume presents this long critical work, written in 1960 and 1961, in its full form for the first time.”—Publishers Weekly
“The guiding light throughout is Duncan’s clear, though subtly resonant prose, which lets even lengthy sentences carry the reader smoothly along from beginning to end. For bringing this major work out of its own obscurity, full credit is due to the editors of The H.D. Book, who compiled and sometimes collated the disparate drafts and previously published versions of Duncan’s endlessly expanding, and hence necessarily unfinished, project. Thanks to their painstaking work, these scattered elements have been now integrated into a whole of sufficient fixity to permit the next phase of their ongoing elaboration—in readers’ minds.”—Foreword Reviews
“I am besotted with a new book that is also an old book. This is The H.D. Book, by Robert Duncan, a wild, dazzling, idiosyncratic magnum opus. . . . The wonders of The H.D. Book are almost without number. [It is] a work of exacting and extravagant optimism.”—Jed Perl New Republic
“Profoundly coherent: a strikingly original and provocative articulation of an American literary vision that is engaged simultaneously with Romantic enchantment, modernist formalism, and an arguably postmodern concern with citational networks, self-displacement, and the shadow play of a language always larger than us.”—Bookforum
“Charming.”—Poetry Foundation/ Harriet
“Into this eldritch tapestry Duncan weaves patches of poetic autobiography, strands of family history and reflections on his intellectual development.”—The Nation
“Extraordinary book.”—Tri-Quarterly Online
“A monumental Duncan work, long anticipated.”—Michael Kearns Beat Scene Magazine
“The belated publication of The H.D. Book will, one hopes, lead more readers to her haunting, resonant later work and also convince more readers to make the leap into Robert Duncan's demanding but gorgeous word-music. Someday, some century even, he and his peers in the Bay Area Renaissance . . . will be recognized as the greatest and most rewarding American poets of their era.”—Greer Mansfield Bookslut
“Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, complete in print at last, now manifests the timeliness of its permanence. Centering on the work of Hilda Doolittle and her part in the invention of modernist poetry, it embraces an assay of modernist practice and tradition as well as a searching investigation of fundamental issues in poetics, with elements of literary autobiography and cultural history and salient reference to depth psychology, cultural anthropology, political economy, art history, philosophy, and religion.”—Jim Powell The Threepenny Rev
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Book One: Beginnings
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3 Eros
Chapter 4 Palimpsest
Chapter 5 Occult Matters
Chapter 6 Rites of Participation
Book Two: Nights and Days
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Appendix 1: Preliminary Notes Toward Book 3 of The H.D. Book
Appendix 2: Composition and Publication History of The H.D. Book
Appendix 3: A List of Works Cited by Robert Duncan in The H.D. Book
Credits
Index