A Context for Modernist Literature in H.D.

The Modernist quest for the renewal of poetry does not cease with World War Two. As Pound, Eliot, Williams and Crane conceive it, the new epic, provides the generic cradle for the inception of a new form. Hélène Aji summarizes certain theoretical precepts Pound received from Robert Browning's long poems. In his early Cantos, Pound adheres to Browning's dicta though later on his writing he begins to change as he starts questioning tradition and poetic authority. The underlying didacticism in Pound's beliefs regarding the role of the poet is not new nor is his intention to re-invent and revive language a novelty. If Euripides' Helen is, according to classical scholarship, one of the most radical revisions of epic myth, H.D. has acquired the necessary poetic background in her long- term experimentation with poetic forms to explore the epic. Though in previous decades she was not challenged by this new modernist trend, in the early 1950's she is prepared to respond to the demands of this male par excellence genre. Pound and his circle are already experimenting with the epic poem as a means of qualifying them as bards of a nation.