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A contribution to: Scrutinizing Beauty

Edited by Eleanor Dobson and Daisy Gudmunsen

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 12

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  This essay explores notions of beauty in the first collection of the modernist poet H.D. (1886–1961), focussing specifically on seashore imagery and how this is used to de- and re-construct notions of beauty and poetic value. Sea Garden, published in 1916, traverses a coastal landscape and documents both its physical features and its unseen meanings. Wildflowers, rock formations, shellfish, and woodlands are placed alongside Hellenic nymphs and spirits, the footprints of past and present human dwellings, and the aesthetic eye of the poet. This collection propelled H.D. to literary acclaim by aligning her work with Imagism, an aesthetic movement defined by poet Ezra Pound that emphasized clarity and directness in verse. H.D.’s involvement with the movement is clear in her depiction of the landscape; portraits of wildflowers are rendered with almost scientific precision, whilst the physicality of the coastal vista is deconstructed into the immediate physical qualities of sand, saltwater, waves, and air. Ecological reality and a detailed eye for natural forms are used as vehicles to explore and define this Imagist aesthetic. Yet this collection, and indeed H.D. as a poet, consistently evades definition. In the same way that a shoreline is and is not land, is and is not sea, H.D. establishes dualisms in her verse that are constantly interrogated and questioned. The separations between human and natural, male and female, named and unknown, beauty and ugliness are found arbitrary and constricting in their separation, and new forms of beauty and poetic legitimacy located in the space between them. This essay traces the significance of the physical shore landscape in H.D.’s experiments with Imagism and the early formation of her poetic voice.

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