Classical Drama and H.D.

A substantial part of the core of H.D.'s classicism is undeniably Euripidean. In Hellenism, Gregory calls Euripides "architectonic" for H.D.'s writing and career. Despite H.D.'s fascination with Sappho and her experiments with other lyric poets, such as Meleager, her "flirtations" with Theocritus, Pausanias and Plato, it is Euripides' work she extensively reads, interprets, comments on, embeds, translates, and cites. Where her contemporaries, like Pound and Eliot, insist on the significance and monumental grandeur of Aeschylus and Sophocles, H.D. opts for the marginal, critically un-acclaimed and marginalized in her time personality and work of Euripides. Her own critical writings on Euripides and justification of this choice remain fragmentary or ambiguous, appearing as they do in brief texts or essays. Yet, we should not deduce that H.D.'s unpublished work is restricted to these brief texts only. A considerable amount of her poetic, prose or non-fiction works, if we abide by this canonical generic division, often met the resistance of the publishers of her time that found her writing as either too ambitious or too insular and fragmented.