Introduction
Generally speaking, it is not commonplace among critics of Helen in Egypt to describe H.D. as lacking agency over her craft. The work seems, at first glance, even more deliberate and carefully structured and deliberate than early poems found in Sea Garden. Nonetheless, scholars who characterize H.D.’s work in such a way neglect the influence of Freud’s writings on the unconscious on her beliefs about writing. The practice of poetry, for H.D., remained intricately connected to the collective histories, shared myths, and archetypes that pervade the unconscious mind. The poet’s task was often to crystallize these ethereal concepts into tangible images, allowing both poet and reader to confront them. For H.D., the practice of poetry, then, is an encounter with an alterity within oneself and one’s culture, and it is this otherness that speaks through the poet.
With that in mind, it becomes entirely possible to situate H.D.’s later poetry within a broader tradition that links poetic voice and alterity. Ancient writers like Hesiod and Homer, Modernist poets like William Carlos Williams and W.B. Yeats, and more contemporary writers Jack Spicer, James Merrill, and Jed Rasula have made similar claims about the poet’s voice. H.D.’s work remains unique in that this alterity that speaks through the poet is not an external influence, such as a muse, a spirit, or even the natural world. Rather, this otherness resides within the poet and his or her reader. It is then confronted, understood, and reclaimed as a result of the poet’s writing process.
H.D.’s variation on this line of thought proves significant in that her writing does not merely report this encounter with otherness to the reader. Rather, H.D. uses the poetic image as a means to place the reader in a more active role. Throughout Helen in Egypt, the reader is asked to confront the cultural detritus that pervades the unconscious mind. Just as the poet translates these collective histories, archetypes, and myths into concrete images, the reader is asked to forge connections between them, ultimately translating them into narrative. In this respect, the otherness that the poet encounters begins to speak through the reader as well. In this essay, I will illustrate these ideas through close reading of a single imagistic motif, that of the sea. I hope that this case study will illuminate the relationship H.D. maintains between voice, alterity, and the image in a more concise manner than would a treatment of the poem in its entirety.
H.D.’s Inheritance: Voice and Alterity in the Modernist Tradition
H.D.’s life and work were marked by an interest in the occult, as well as the implications it held for her poetry. For her, psychoanalysis was merely another variation on the rituals associated with Tarot, séances, and other comparable practices. This interest in channeling the voices of others remains largely a product of the cultural environment in which H.D. wrote. As Timothy Materer notes, writers of the generation before H.D., particularly William Butler Yeats, turned to these new age practices when faced with the decline of organized religion.[1] Materer’s observation is useful for understanding the sudden proliferation of occult practices among literary artists. For many writers, occult practices served as a means by which to cope with the drastic cultural upheavals of the time period without organized religion. Yeats and other fin de siècle writers ultimately sought new frameworks for understanding the world around them.
H.D., Pound, Eliot and other Modernist poets perceived Yeats as their most immediate processor, a bridge between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Indeed, Cassandra Laity describes Yeats as being a mediating figure, transmitting a Romantic fascination with introspection and the otherworldly to the next generation of poets.[2] Laity’s description of Yeats and his influence is useful for understanding the significance that Romantic ideas about voice and alterity held for Modernist poets. H.D. clearly sought to render these practices compatible with new cultural-historical developments, one of the most significant being the rise of psychoanalysis.
In many ways, H.D. is unique in her aligning the psyche with the occult practices of Yeats and Romantics like Keats and Shelley. Pound certainly believed that the practices of “old mystery cults” remained generative for his composition practices, serving as a source of raw material. Timothy Materer quotes Pound as saying that “the ‘matter’ of the mystery cults…provides a ‘matter of poetry’ much as Arthurian lore provides a ‘matter of Britain.'”[3] Indeed, it was commonplace to link the voices of others to the very essence of poetry. Yet these voices always came from outside of the poet. Along these lines, Donald J. Childs notes that Eliot too described himself as a reformed occultist. He fittingly quotes a reviewer of the Waste Land, Tom Gibbons, who observed that “Eliot’s references in The Waste Land to various Tarot cards suggests that he knew ‘considerably more about occult literature than he admitted in his notes.'”[4] For Eliot, too, One can conclude that H.D.’s generation of poets inherited an abiding interest not only in the occult, but in accessing the voices associating with other times and places. Indeed, they envisioned these occult practices as an inexhaustible resource for their composition practices. For both Pound and Eliot, however, the voices that speak through the poet came from without, rather than from within oneself.
H.D. was the first and only poet of this generation to link voice, alterity, and the psyche. With that in mind, her presentation of the unconscious as an otherness that speaks through the poet may be read as a singular variation on the occult practices of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound.
Oneself as Another: H.D., Psychoanalysis, and Alterity
H.D. entered psychoanalysis in 1933 due to a writer’s block unlike any she had experienced before.[5] As Trudi Tate notes, psychoanalysis became a means by which H.D. could overcome trauma experienced as a result of the First World War, in which she had lost friends and loved ones. For H.D., the interwar years represented a sense of both personal and cultural loss, a realization that the narratives promulgated within culture can damage the psyche and the body.[6] For H.D., psychoanalysis represented a means by which to reclaim one’s own narrative, and its place within culture. This impulse to rectify historical wrongs through narrative surfaces repeatedly in H.D.’s correspondence from the time period, in she describes her personal history as a “straight narrative” to which she lacks often access.[7] For H.D., the inaccessibility of one’s personal and cultural narrative remained intricately linked to the role of the unconscious mind in determining one’s conscious experience.
Just as Eliot, Yeats, and Pound turned to occult practices times of historical upheaval, H.D. turned to psychoanalytic thought as a means by which to understand a rapidly changing social landscape. Freud’s writings on the relationship between culture and the psyche proved especially influential for her poetic thought. According to this line of argument, the mind is filled with the residue of one’s encounters with culture. Like a literary text, it is filled with filled with recurring images, symbols, and motifs from one’s life in the world, and these evoke myriad possible interpretations on the part of both analyst and analysand. Indeed, Freud describes the images that populate the psyche as “visible plastic symbols,” suggesting the myriad possible “readings” of the analysand’s psyche.[8] For H.D., the unconscious mind represented the buried or inaccessible significance associated with these cultural symbols. Indeed, Susan Edmunds describes H.D. as “literalizing” Freud’s notion of the unconscious mind, identifying it with “Egyptian and Pre-Hellenic civilizations,” as well as with “female sexuality and the oedipal phase.”[9] Indeed, H.D. perceived the unconscious mind as closely linked to collective histories, myths, and rituals. Apprehending collective consciousness remained key to understanding and gaining agency over the individual psyche.
In this respect, H.D.’s experience in psychoanalysis was closely linked to the occult practices that fascinated Eliot, Yeats, and Pound. She frequently conflated Freudian ideas with Egyptology, mysticism, and her abiding interest in ancient rituals, leading to a somewhat unorthodox model of psychoanalytic practice. Consider the descriptions of her sessions with him in her memoir, Tribute to Freud. Early in the book, she writes,
Freud took me into the other room and showed me the things on his table. He took the ivory Vishnu with the upright serpents and canopy of snake heads, and put it into my hands. He selected a tiny Athené from near the end of the semicircle, he said “This is my favorite.” […] He opened the case against the wall and displayed his treasures, the antique rings.[10]
For H.D., the role of both analyst and analysand remained closely linked to that of the conjurer. This idea is enacted in H.D.’s presentation of Freud as a proprietor of exotic ritual objects, one who controls access to them. These objects evoke the cultural detritus that fills the psyche, of which the analysand lacks understanding or control. The analysand, in this passage and the book as a whole, appears as an apprentice to the conjurer/analyst. The goal of psychoanalysis, in H.D.’s assessment, was to gain agency over the fragments of myth, ritual, and history that populate the mind.
The unconscious mind, then, functioned as a repository for the images and symbols associated with culture, as well as one’s experience inhabiting culture. For H.D., psychoanalysis allowed the analysand to apprehend the recurring motifs in what Kirk Bingaman terms “the text of the psyche,” eventually understanding their hidden significance.[11] It is this inaccessible knowledge within the self that is made visible in poetry.
Psychoanalysis and Alterity: The Writing of Helen in Egypt
Helen in Egypt may best be described as an alternative retelling of the myth of Helen of Troy, in which Helen does not stay in Troy, but rather, is conveyed by the gods to Egypt. There she engages in introspection that mirrors the process of self-scrutiny that one would see in a session of psychoanalysis. Indeed, H.D. frequently conflates the biographical with the mythical, superimposing her own experience with Freud onto the myth of Helen of Troy.
H.D. began wrote Helen in Egypt between the year of 1952 and 1955, nearly twenty years after her sessions with Sigmund Freud.[12] By this time, she had begun revising Freud’s teachings about the unconscious mind, re-envisioning ideas that seemed potentially useful for her poetry. As Cynthia Hogue notes, by the time that she had begun writing Helen in Egypt, H.D. “conceived of herself as post-analyst.[13]” H.D. had begun to conflate feminism, mysticism, psychoanalysis, and what Hogue describes as the “healing” properties of poetry.[14] For Doolittle, then, poetry represented a space in which one could explore (and possibly reconstitute) the relationship between the poet, his or her personal history, and the collective histories that populate the unconscious mind. For H.D., it is this interplay that makes poetry possible, as well as inviting the reader to take part in the work of the analyst/poet as she deconstructs the images and symbols that populate the text of the psyche.
Indeed, she perceived the writing of Helen in Egypt as a healing process for both herself and the culture she inhabited. Roy Ginsburg describes H.D.’s work with Freud as an effort “to decipher the origins of human culture in ways that would fortify each in determining his/her own nature amidst the terrors of the modern world.”[15] In many ways, Ginsburg suggests the significance that World War Two held for both H.D. and Freud. Both saw the human psyche as being imperiled by the world around them. Helen in Egypt may be interpreted as an intervention in both her life and culture, an effort to bring collective myths, histories, and beliefs to light. This would allow us to gain agency over them before they had caused even greater violence to both the psyche and the body. For H.D., the poet/analyst occupied a unique role, one that allowed him or her to hold a mirror to culture.
This interplay between poet, audience, and the unconscious mind remains especially visible H.D.’s presentation of the sea in Helen in Egypt. When read in light of Leslie Scalapino’s reading of Egypt as an emblem for the unconscious mind, this motif could literally represent collective history, myth, and ritual made tangible.[16] This imagistic motif, like the images and symbols that inhabit the psyche, is constantly reinscribed by the poet, acquiring myriad possible interpretations for the reader. Thus the image of the sea in Helen in Egypt, like Freud’s dream-image, serves to evoke a wide range of subjective responses. These responses, as with interpretations of the text of the human psyche, prove revelatory of both the poem and the reader. In the subsequent sections of this essay, I will use the image of the sea as a case study, which will hopefully illustrate the relationship that H.D. envisioned between voice, alterity, and the image in a more concise manner than would a treatment of the book in its entirety.
The Sea as Dream-Image in Helen in Egypt
Throughout Helen in Egypt, the sea, like other imagistic motifs in the book, functions as a Freudian dream-image. In his seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud defines the dream-image as a “visible, plastic symbol” that resists a single fixed interpretation.[17] Leslie Scalapino’s reading of Egypt as an emblem for the unconscious mind proves useful for thinking about the role of the poetic image in relation to the unconscious. Indeed, the image in Helen in Egypt appears as part of its topography, which both Helen and H.D. struggle to navigate. For both poet and heroine, navigating the psyche entails both taking stock of the myriad symbols that inhabit it, and explicating their meaning. As the poem unfolds, her efforts describe the sea in particular become increasingly convoluted, as the image gives rise to myriad number of subjective associations. This proliferation of meaning suggests the fundamentally irrational nature of the unconscious mind, which, like the otherworldly spirits in the work of W.B. Yeats, has begun to speak through the poet.
Consider the first appearance of the sea in the book. H.D. writes,
How did we know each other?
was it the sea-enchantment in his eyes
of Thetis, his sea-mother?Was it the token given?
I was alone, bereft,
and wore no zone, no crown,and he was shipwrecked…[18]
Here H.D. presents the sea as a source of “enchantment,” something fundamentally irrational and beyond her control. Indeed, the sea functions as a counterpoint to Helen’s more rational efforts to understand the world around her (i.e., deciphering hieroglyphs on temple walls and constructing narratives about her experience). Indeed, the sea seems to undermine H.D.’s efforts to forge a coherent narrative about herself and her lover, Achilles, in this passage.
With that said, one must also note the incredible variation within H.D.’s presentation of this single imagistic motifs. While the sea is constantly presented as an irrational force, it is reinscribed with new possibilities for interpretation as the book unfolds. H.D. writes, for example, later in the text, in the voice of Achilles,
Helena? Who is she?
this was only the second time
that he uttered the deathless name,
for deathless it must remain;I must fight for Helena,
lest the lure of his sea-eyes
endanger my memory[19]
Here H.D. presents the sea as a source irrational drives and desires, over which the speaker often lacks agency. Indeed, Lesley Wheeler reads H.D.’s sea motif as reflecting the characters’ sense of being “enclosed” in or trapped by the psyche.[20] This notion of being subject to the psyche, especially its irrationality, is useful for thinking about this passage. As in the previously cited passage, H.D. presents Achilles as frustrated that his more rational desires are undermined by the unconscious mind. Unlike that passage, however, one observes here that the speaker is unwillingly subjected to the psyche, an idea that complicates what came before. The image of the sea, like Freud’s dream-image, resists a single fixed interpretation.
Indeed, this proliferation of meaning continues throughout the poem. H.D. writes in a later passage,
Who will forget Helen?
forever the swirling foam
threatens the ship’s keel,for Pallas remembered
insult before her altar,
Ajax and Maiden Cassandra;the sea would revenge the wrong,
the sea would take its toll,
remorseless, with Victory…[21]
H.D. conflates the sea with history and myth, suggesting their omnipresence in the unconscious mind. It seems entirely possible that one would read earlier passages in Helen in Egypt and interpret the sea as representing an engagement with memory and the unconscious mind on a purely individual level. Here H.D. problematizes such a reading, suggesting that the individual and the collective remain fundamentally intertwined. This idea seems especially visible in her conflation gods and goddesses with the sea itself. H.D. suggests that the affronts to sacred culture she has described (the “insult before her altar”) have become part of collective consciousness, a phenomenon that ultimately impacts the individual mind.
In short, these passages suggest that the image of the sea functioned, for H.D., as both an emblem for the unconscious mind and as a Freudian symbol or dream-image. Indeed, the imagistic motif acquires myriad possibilities for interpretation as book unfolds. This proliferation of meaning suggests the difficulty of navigating the topography of the unconscious mind, as it is constantly shifting. For H.D., it is this continuous effort to map the psyche that gives rise to poetry, and to the encounter with an otherness that speaks through the poet.
Voice, Narrative, and the Dream-Image in Helen in Egypt
Throughout Helen in Egypt, H.D. presents a variety of highly evocative images, yet resists imposing narrative continuity onto them. Indeed, the poetic image often serves to undermine or complicate the more traditional narrative structures that appear in the book. With that said, H.D.’s undermining narrative in the conventional sense may best be understood in the context of her beliefs about psychoanalysis, alterity, and the occult. The image in its mystery remained intertwined with the alterity that a poet must confront in order to create. Because H.D. envisioned the image as an artifact of this encounter with otherness, within the self and within culture, she perceived explication in the traditional sense as an unrewarding, if not impossible, task. For H.D., the presence of narrative in a work like Helen in Egypt would also stifle the generative qualities of the poetic image. Indeed, the poetic image, for H.D., afforded insight into the terrain of the unconscious as a direct result of her aversion to traditional narrative, as well as its implied logocentricism.
The organization of the book offers a great deal of insight into H.D.’s beliefs about the poetic image and alterity. Presented as lyric strophes, each of which is prefaced by a paragraph of explanatory prose, the work frequently allows narrative to be problematized by the poetic image. As the poet encounters otherness within the self and within culture, he or she begins asking new questions about myth, history, and collective consciousness, rather than answering them. These ideas are frequently mirrored in H.D.’s presentation of the sea as uncontrollable by human reason. Indeed, the character in the book are frequently portrayed as subject to its irrationality. Consider the following prose passage. H.D. writes in the voice of Helen,
Now Helen’s concern is anxiety about the Sea-goddess. This is her island. Helen has been recalled from Egypt to a Green union, marriage or mystery, by Thetis’s “Achilles waits, and life.” But for the moment, her overwhelming experience in Egypt must be tempered or moderated, if, “in life.” she is to progress at all.[22]
Here the prose passage serves to clarify, explicating relationships between characters in the book in a third-person voice. This voice does not interpret, but rather, reports in a scientific fashion. Indeed, one may read such passages as a parody of contemporary perception of psychoanalysis as scientific and fundamentally rational, rather than mystical. The scientific tone that H.D. takes forms a stark contrast to the mythical imagery that populates the prose passage, particularly the “Sea-goddess” and “her island.” Indeed, H.D. further complicates this more rational approach to understanding the psyche in the verse that follows,
And Thetis? she of the many forms
had manifested as Choragus,
Thetis, lure-of-the-sea;will she champion?
will she reject me?[23]
H.D. presents Helen’s encounter with otherness, within herself and within culture, as complicating her more rational observations. This impulse remains especially visible as H.D. follows the prose passage with a series of questions, none of which are answered directly. Indeed, the proliferation of images serves to complicate the prose passage through juxtaposition, as connections are suggested, but never specified explicitly. Rather, H.D. allows various possibilities for interpretation to coexist in the same narrative space, forming a sharp contrast with the narrative section its attempts to delineate and specify connections. For H.D., this logic seems fruitless in light of the unconscious mind’s irrational qualities. Indeed, the terrain of Egypt of itself appears as a place where logic no longer holds. These passages are best understood with the aid of Leslie Scalapino’s interpretation of Egypt as the unconscious mind. Indeed, Helen in Egypt seems to present both poetry and psychoanalysis as a process of opening oneself up to the irrational, and a willingness to see one’s assumptions about the world problematized in such a way.
Voice, Alterity, and the Reader in Helen in Egypt
In many ways, H.D.’s aversion to tradition narrative structures in Helen in Egypt places the reader in a more active role, since he or she is asked speculate as to the narrative that connects the disparate images within the collection. For H.D., what the reader is asked to create is not narrative in the traditional sense. Rather, he or she is invited to tease out multiple and often contradictory possibilities, allowing them to exist within the same narrative space. In many ways, the reader is placed in the role of the analyst/conjurer, the text of the psyche being the poem itself. Thus the alterity that the poet has encountered begins to speak through the reader as well. H.D.’s efforts to utilize readerly intent differentiate her work from other writers in the same tradition, such as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, as well as later poets James Merrill and Jed Rasula. Indeed, H.D. does not merely report an encounter with otherness, as her predecessors often do, but rather, she allows this otherness to speak through the reader as well.
This impulse remains especially visible in H.D.’s presentation of the sea alongside other imagistic motifs. She writes,
We must blame someone. Hecate – a witch – a vulture, and finally, as if he had run out of a common incentive, he taunts her – a hieroglyph. This is almost funny, she must stop him, he is after all the son of the sea-goddess. She has named Isis, the Egyptian Aphrodite, the primal cause of all the madness. But another, born of the sea, is nearer, his own mother. Again, she thinks of her and reminds Achilles of his divine origin….[24]
Here H.D. juxtaposes the image of the sea with another recurring motif in the book, that of the hieroglyph. In doing so, she invites the reader to speculate as to the relationship between the sacred (an idea often implied by her invocation of hieroglyphs, temples, and rituals) and consciousness. This passage portrays the two as intricately linked, yet the characters often lose sight of this connection. Indeed, H.D. has to “remind Achilles of his divine origin.” With that said, this relationship is further complicated in the verse that follows,
What sort of goddess is this?
Where are we? Who are you?
Where is this desolate coast?
Who am I? Am I a ghost?[25]
In passages like this one, H.D. problematizes the relationship she has already established between consciousness and the sacred. H.D. portrays much the relationship between the two as being unknowable or inaccessible. Yet the reader, like an analyst, sees traces of how the interplay between the divine and human consciousness has shaped the lives of characters. It is then the reader’s task to form a hypothesis about its nature. Had the reader done so previously, their interpretation would ultimately be problematized by the verse cited. In many ways, H.D. underscores the ways in which rituals, mystical beliefs, and occult practices of the past have become part of collective consciousness, whether we understand them or not. This possibility for interpretation exists alongside H.D.’s portrayal of these things as both beneficial and malevolent, particularly as she compares them to a “ghost” haunting the speaker of the poem. It is then the task of the reader to sort through the detritus that populates the unconscious mind, and Egyptian terrain, ultimately deciding which fragments of memory have meaning.
This proliferation of meaning ultimately suggests an alternative model of psychoanalysis, one that forms a stark contrast to the more scientifically minded one that pervaded the cultural landscape in H.D.’s time. Indeed, Doolittle presents an egalitarian model of psychoanalytic practice, in which both reader and author, analyst and analysand, participate in the work of creating meaning. Dana Collecott elaborates in H.D. and Sapphic Modernism,
The textual metaphors, which recall substitution of a “phantom” for “the real Helen,” and her translation from Greece to Egypt, prepare the reader for her transposition in H.D.’s text from object to subject. “She herself is the writing” is the most emphatic and enigmatic statement in the prose accompanying the poem…[26]
Collecott’s reading of Helen’s character is useful understanding the relationship between text and reader that H.D. establishes. Helen is transmuted from object to subject in both the literal and the psychoanalytic sense of the work. Both Helen and “the writing” that represents her are subject to the analysis of the reader, who ultimately must create meaning from the images and fragments with which he or she is presented.
With that said, one may infer that the model of psychoanalytic practice promulgated in Helen in Egypt remained heavily informed by H.D.’s beliefs about alterity and the occult, as well as the tradition in which she wrote. In much the same way that the unconscious mind speaks through the poet as he or she creates, it also begins to speak through the reader as he or she forges connections between the disparate images within the manuscript. These speculations about the meaning of the work often take the form of narrative, which reveals as much about the reader as the work itself.
Conclusion
Throughout Helen in Egypt, H.D. presents the unconscious mind as an alterity that speaks through the poet during the creative process. With that in mind, it becomes entirely possible to situate H.D. within a broader tradition of writers who linked poetic voice and otherness, including W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, as well as such contemporary writers as James Merrill and Jed Rasula. While H.D. certainly should be read within this broader context, one must note that her work remains distinctive in the relationship that she creates between alterity, the poetic image, and the reader. Throughout Helen in Egypt, H.D. places the reader in a more active role than other writers within this same tradition. Rather than simply reporting her encounter with otherness within the self and within culture, H.D. draws the reader into this encounter. More specifically, H.D.’s use of the poetic image allows the reader to participate in the process of creating meaning, and, in turn, the encounter with otherness that gives rise to the work itself.
H.D.’s unique contribution to this literary tradition gives rise to several broader questions about poetic voice, as well as psychoanalysis and readerly intent. First, Helen in Egypt portrays the poetic voice as being constructed by culture and by the reader. In many ways, voice remains inseparable from being read and interpreted by another. Approached with that in mind, Helen in Egypt offers a novel contribution to existing literature that links poetic voice and alterity. Her predecessors portray these encounters with otherness a receiving of inspiration from without, a process during which the writer and reader maintain a somewhat passive and static role. For H.D., the writer certainly must open his or herself to this encounter with otherness. Yet the writer also strives to draw the reader into this encounter through form, style, and technique. In many ways, this impulse is embodied in H.D.’s use of the poetic image. Only then does the reader complete the work by interacting with it, in effect fulfilling and complicating authorial intention. H.D. problematizes her predecessor’s portrayal of writer, reader, and alterity as being static, suggesting that this relationship changes with every reader, and their every reading of a given text.
Approached with these ideas in mind, H.D.’s portrayal of the unconscious mind as the alterity that speaks through both the poet and the reader retains several significant implications for psychoanalytic practice. H.D. not only questions the logocentricism of those who view psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline, but also the power structures inherent in science and medicine. Throughout Helen in Egypt, H.D. presents an egalitarian model of psychoanalytic practice, where analyst and analysand collaborate in the creation of meaning, in much the same way that she envisions the reader in relation to the author. Indeed, one might read H.D.’s alternative model of psychoanalytic practice as an implicit critique of the gendered nature of psychoanalysis and the scientific infrastructure surrounding it. H.D.’s alternative model, rather than representing presumption and hubris, could be said to rectify inequalities within the discipline as it existed during the composition of Helen in Egypt.
[1] Timothy Materer. Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
[2] Cassandra Laity. H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
[3] Timothy Materer. Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 22.
[4] Donald J. Childs. From Philosophy to Poetry: T.S. Eliot’s Knowledge and Experience (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), 88.
[5] Nancy Kuhl, “H.D. and Freud, the Poet and the Professor,” Yale University, http://psycheandmuse.library.yale.edu/h-d-freud/ (accessed March 4, 2012).
[6] Trudy Tate, Modernism, History, and the First World War (New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 19.
[7] Sigmund Freud, Hilda Doolittle, and Bryher. Analyzing Freud: The Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle. (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2002), 280.
[8] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 323.
[9] Susan Edmunds, Out of Line: History, Psychoanalysis, and Montage in H.D.’s Long Poems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 147.
[10] Hilda Doolittle, Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1984), 118.
[11] Kirk A. Bingaman, Freud and Faith: Living in Tension (Buffalo: SUNY Press, 2003), 54.
[12] Susan Edmunds, Out of Line: History, Psychoanalysis, and Montage in H.D.’s Long Poems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 95.
[13] Cynthia Hogue, Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity (Buffalo: SUNY Press, 1995), 226.
[14] Ibid, 226.
[15] Roy Ginsburg, Psychoanalysis and Culture at the Millennium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 12.
[16] Leslie Scalapino, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (Potes & Poets Press, 1989), 56.
[17] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Translated by A.A. Brill (New York: Mobile Reference, 2010).
[18] H.D., Helen in Egypt (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1974), 4.
[19] Ibid, 37.
[20] Lesley Wheeler, The Poetics of Enclosure: American Women Poets from Dickinson to Dove (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 82.
[21] H.D., Helen in Egypt (New York: New Directions, 1974), 121.
[22] Ibid, 117.
[23] Ibid, 117.
[24] Ibid, 15.
[25] Ibid, 16.
[26] Dana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 147.