Dissemination and Disfiguration: "Hymen" by H. D.
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This article investigates one of the first major post-Imagist poems written by H.D., a Modernist poet, essayist, novelist, translator and adapter of classical Greek plays whose literary output is still too often thought to boil down to a few Pound-trimmed Haiku-like poems published in the Des Imagistes anthology of 1914 and its 'Amygist'? avatars (1915-1917). This close reading of 'Hymen'? ( Hymen, 1921) seeks to show that the polymorphous text hinges upon a poetics of symbolic subversion, where sense and sensation mingle to blur the polarities usually held to define subjective as well as sexual identities. At odds with the Poundian credo of the 'direct presentation of the thing'? and its emphasis on particulars, 'Hymen'? provides an alternative where the art of suggestion prevails. Drawing on Sapphic imagery to shed new light on the questions of femininity and eroticism, H.D.'s poem revisits classical symbolism and Victorian rhetoric through a language of desubjectivation and disfiguration.
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