Literary Representation of Selected Works

As a modernist woman writer, H.D. could best be described as an advocate of experimentation and change. F. S. Flint, an early representative member of the movement of Imagism, discusses the ideological core of this generation that does not endorse a single form but demonstrates "a free spirit". Flint's remarks reveal that the aim of this new generation is to discover new forms of artistic expression. His views match equally well with H.D.'s heretic practices and her need to escape from generic protocols. The literary modernist movement emerges as a need to revise, correct, destroy, and restore constructively a world in crisis. The experimentation with literary genres, the invention of generic hybrids, the fragmentary structure of verse, intertextuality and translation are a few examples of the paths the early literary modernists pursued. Their effort should be seen in tandem with an overall deeper cultural need for revisiting the past in order to effect changes in contemporary language and culture. Along with these creative practices, the rebirth of epic poetry engenders neo-epics as new repositories of contemporary history or as retrospective re-readings of the ancient classical works that find their analogies in the present moment. In this context, the past is used not as a theoretical, academic tool of imitation of bygone cultures and civilizations but, rather, as a tool for the renewal and the purgation of language from academic pedanticism. During the first thirty years of the twentieth century, H.D. was actively connected with, and contributed to, the movement of Imagism. This formative period, crucial to H.D.'s evolution as poet and artist, is part of the investigation of this book. All three modernist currents converge with her Hellenic projects in lyric poetry and her first experimentations with Euripides' oeuvre. Of key importance if her emphasis on the renewal of the English language through the use and translation of classical languages as a redemptive medium that can allow for innovative work and experimentation with regard to poetry writing and poetic forms.

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.

In recent decades, Heliodora has received greater attention since it contains H.D.'s translation and poetic expansion of four Sapphic fragments. Along with her investigation of the Sapphic and lyric poems, H.D. is gradually creating her own archive, the unpublished Notes on Euripides, Pausanias and Greek Lyric Poets. H.D. has produced a range of poems, translation exercises from the Greek Anthology and poems that work palimpsestically within the context of the Trojan War as with "After Troy," "Cassandra," "Thetis," and "Helen." In her comparison between Hymen and Heliodora, Cassandra Laity establishes a generic parallelism between the Swinburnian "deployment of deviant personae in his various forms of the self", since H.D. evolves her dramatic monologue technique in these two volumes, while concurrently with the publication of the two poetry collections.

Euripides' Ion constitutes another demanding work in which H.D. processes and amplifies her task as poet and translator. This play signals a turning point in H.D.'s Euripidean studies since the text embeds a complex pattern of generic and mythic patterns which she infuses into the prose captions, that is, the preludes to the lyric and dramatic parts. In addition, it is her first work that receives critical attention following her first poetic period. At this point, she becomes acknowledged as a poet other than her formerly known self as an Imagist icon. Ion marks a time when H.D.'s dialogue with Euripides seems more flexible and freer from form-imposed affiliations or generic boundaries.

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.

This book will be dedicated to the examination of all the important manifestations of Plath's poetry: namely political, romantic, modernist, feminist and psychoanalytic, in order to move a step further away from traditional criticism and to prove that the personae Sylvia Plath created were nothing but masks, whose multiplicity are open to interpretation and this interpretation is left to the inclination of individual readers. This poetry is so well crafted, however, that multiple views must be taken into account. Plath managed to create a mystery around her name and her poetry, not only by enacting the suicide she wrote about in her later poems, but also by challenging the reader by incorporating all the elements that were available to her both from her predecessors' poetry as well as the issues of her time.

The question of whether Sylvia Plath was a confessional poet or not, has dominated and been at the centre of most critical studies of her work, ever since the publication of her final collection of poems. In this book, I will try to do more than show how similar her poetry is to that of other confessional poets, like Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke and Anne Sexton. To achieve this purpose, I will present a very brief comparison of "Daddy", one of Plath's most characteristically confessional poems, with Anne Sexton's "My Friend, My Friend", focusing on the discovery of those elements that allow Plath to detach herself from the poetry of the group through the uniqueness of her verse. Moreover, in order to show whether or not Plath developed as a poet in her late poetry, I will compare two of her own poems that are very similar thematically - "Tale of A Tub" and "Ariel" - and the focus in the latter will shift from the examination of the romantic elements to be found in it, to a more general analysis, so as to show whether Plath was successful in fulfilling her own dream of becoming a poetess, of being able to stand side by side with the masters, the 'strong poets', in Bloomian terms. Finally, I will examine her poetry through a psychoanalytic prism, and propose a way of reading her poems, which even today remain very popular.

This analysis attempts to present the theoretical discussions of Plath's poetry within the general context of feminist criticism and writing by women and the problems faced by women as authors and poets. The book deals with the representation of the female body in Plath's poetry, by examining the views of such critics as Alicia Suskin Ostriker and Simone de Beauvoir, and specifically, how the body is represented in particular poems, like "Tulips" and "Ariel". Finally, the chapter concludes with a continuation of the discussion concerning poetic influence and origin, as well as an original analysis or deconstruction if you wish, of "Lady Lazarus", according to Aristotle's definition of tragedy. This will be attempted by comparing Plath's poem to Greek tragedy, unmasking yet another of the poet's mythic façades and thus, giving both poet and poem a place in the poetic tradition. What is more, in such an interpretation, many elements of the Romantic theory of poetic creation may be found and a re-inforcement of the view of Plath's poetry.

When it comes to a subjective form of art, especially poetry, the answer to the above question is even more difficult. Some critics say that one needs to have had a somewhat similar experience in order to write about something as big as the Holocaust, for example; others say that poetry written by someone who belongs to a different generation than the actual survivor, is a mere recording of the facts and lacks the sparkle that will lift the poem to the sphere of original poetry. There are others, however, who believe that it is possible to write about the Holocaust, as long as one does not deal directly with the subject. One has to find an alternative route in order to reach the core of a particular historical event. This route, they believe, is through metaphor.

The tale's emphasized novelty is manifold. Its action takes place not in a faraway land or mythical past but in Dresden, where Hoffmann moved in March 1813 to work as musical director for Joseph Seconda's opera company. He repopulates the Saxon capital with all kinds of fantastic personages who had been personae non grata during the Age of Enlightenment, rehabilitating fairies, witches and elemental spirits as voices of nature and poetry, and thereby continuing the Romantic tradition that challenged the folkloristic monopoly on the German fairy-tale. Wilhelm Grimm, who worked especially hard to excise any sexual or "indecent" references from the folk tales in order to make them safe for pedagogical use. This disdain is understandable. The Brothers Grimm's collecting of folk tales served to extract the fantastic element from reality and confine it within the book covers. The Romantics, on the contrary, made constituent frameworks of the book so amorphous that enchantment once again returned to the world.

In the very first sentence of "Spiegel, das Kätzchen" (1855), Gottfried Keller delineates what this story is about: economy, language, and psychology. The artistic tradition has endowed mirrors with the power to speak the truth and to reveal what otherwise falls in the blind spot of reason. Cats, on the other hand, with their experience as witches' sidekicks, decorated with boots and golden chains, are dressed to narrate and to represent obscure regions of knowledge. From the folk tales collections of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, Ludwig Tieck's Gestiefelter Kater (1797) brings the puss in boots onto the Romantic stage. In 1820 Alexander Pushkin's Ruslan and Ludmila and E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (Die Lebensansichten des Katers Murr) add narration to the job description of the felis domesticus. Published in 1856 as part of the first volume of The People from Seldwyla cycle (often regarded as Keller's digression from Realism), "Spiegel, das Kätzchen," on the one hand, continues that tradition. On the other hand, however, Keller's work unfolds as a response to and a critique of Romantic narrative style and techniques as well as a satirical reflection on the concept of poetic enchantment. Whereas Hoffmann uses fantasy mainly in order to figuratively present and interpret psychological reality, Keller's task appears to be the opposite. His engagement with the magical has disenchantment as its goal. However, it surpasses a sheer rejection of Romanticism as it ascribes the enchantment effect of language to its materiality. Keller recognizes three realities, psychological, economic, and linguistic, and the argument of this chapter proceeds in three steps that address their significance and interdependency in Keller's work.

Dostoevsky's unfinished early novel Netochka Nezvanova reflect the young author's view of literature as a kind of metaphorical enchantment. About three decades after E.T.A. Hoffmann invents the magic library of Archivist Lindhorst as a portal to the poetic realm in "Der goldne Topf" (1814), Fyodor Dostoevsky constructs another library, grounded in a far less phantasmic dimension but marked by an equally hypnotic propensity. In Dostoevsky's library, a young girl, the eponymous narrator of the novel, finds refuge from the hardships of her orphaned life. Unlike Anselmus who becomes entranced in the process of copying mysterious manuscripts in Hoffmann's fairy-tale (310), Netochka is spellbound by reading.