Psychoanalysis and Eros Unbound

Duncan’s H.D. Book, like H.D.’s own poetic project, is an erotics as much as it is a poetics. Duncan frequently references Platonism and the guiding spirit of Eros.¹ Poetry for Duncan and H.D. is an erotic initiation into all that is repressed by capital’s oligarchical warp. These are the same forces of psychic and sexual commodification that D.H. Lawrence once described as the power of ‘the grey ones’.². A poem by H.D. from 1918 entitled ‘Eros’ provides a glimpse into her characterisation of the ancient, winged god in a prison cell.

Could Eros be kept
he was prisoned long since 
and sick with imprisonment,
could Eros be kept,
others would have taken him
and crushed out his life.

Could Eros be kept,
we had sinned against the great god, 
we too might have prisoned him outright

Could Eros be kept,
nay thank him and the bright goddess
that he left us. 
(‘Eros’)

The twilight of the gods – he mood of Gotterdammerung – is not for H.D. something to be mourned, because in escaping underground into the word, Eros escapes imprisonment and enters an alliance with the invisible.

What need of a lamp
when day lightens us,
what need to bind love
when loves stands 
with such radiant wings over us?
what need – 
yet to sing love, 
love must first shatter us. 
(‘Eros’)

This shattering evokes many things, including the troubadour tradition of Dantean erotic lore, in which the beloved shatters the enclosed vessel that is the individual soul and pierces the enclosed self with the light of erotic divinity. This divinity is inescapably linked with what Duncan terms ‘homoEros’, a ‘human who is eros-infused’.⁵ Eros is that which was ‘prisoned’ and ‘sick with imprisonment’, a literal imprisonment in many cases. In the shade of radiant wings, which light up the prison world, the control of the ‘grey ones’ over word and body is revealed by H.D.’s occult poet to have limits. There is another world beneath or within this one, which the incantatory power of the poet reveals, if only for a second.

H.D.’s poetry of forbidden Eros is fashioned from all that is discarded by officially sanctioned religious discourse. It draws on all that was once declared heretical, and which has fallen into the creative pastiche of occult practitioners. Unlike Blavatsky and other occult gurus, H.D. appears unconcerned with attracting followers or gathering subscriptions, but instead incites illicit desires in fellow readers. Because of her flights with angels and her dialogues with gods, H.D.’s poetry also fell foul of the neo-ecclesiastical hierarchy of the academic-poetic institution of Duncan’s day, who had effectively written her out of the modernist canon. As the critic Dudley Fitts wrote about her Trilogy (1944-1945-1946), composed while bombs fell in London during World War Two, ‘This is incantation, but of an irresponsible, even perverse kind.’ ⁶ Another critic Randall Jarrell, wrote that her work, ‘Felt queer sincere…more than a little silly’. ⁷ These accusations combine fear – to incant the irresponsible – and derision. Reading H.D. made one feel queer and silly. These accusations are interpreted by Duncan as, ‘an appeal to some right proper and respectable range of thought and feeling any member of a university faculty must keep in order to maintain his position.’⁸ H.D. herself anticipates these reactions in The Walls Do Not Fall from 1944, in which she incorporates the mockery of critics:

…stumbling toward
vague cosmic expression,

obvious sentiment
folder round a spiritual bank-account,

with credit-loss too starkly indicated,
a riot of unpruned imagination,
(31. The Walls Do Not Fall)

In the economy of academic criticism, imagination must be put to work, it must be made responsible, teachable, and accountable. Rioting—imaginary or otherwise—is utterly off the cards.

We cannot read critiques of H.D. without sensing another dimension of the erotic character of her poetry, namely her sexuality. This theme is particularly acute in Duncan’s analysis given his open homosexuality, his pioneering essays on gay liberation, and his persistent desire to release the power of the feminine in his own writing, casting the poet as alchemical androgyne. As poet and scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes, ‘Duncan designates his [own] poems as ‘‘polysemous’, creating ‘Man His-Her-Self’ and the poet as ‘His-Her agent’.¹⁰

Duncan finds in H.D. an initiator into the erotic-poetic arts. Duncan is particularly inspired by H.D.’s re-casting of psychoanalysis as an occult science, which gives the poet access to an unconscious ‘hieroglyphic’ language. For H.D., ‘Pysche, Eros, Thanatos – the cast of the Freudian metapsychology were members of a new mysery, cult’¹¹ H.D. was analysed by Sigmund Freud himself, first in 1933 and then again in 1934. She evokes him in a poem entitled ‘The Master’ from 1935.

...
I did not know how to differentiate
between volcanic desire,
anemones like embers
and purple fire
of violets
like red heat,
and the cold
silver 
of her feet... 
(‘The Master’

Analysis does not offer ‘closure’ or a ‘cure’ to her sexuality and visionary experiences, instead, it affirms them. After a conflicted back and forth between the patient in the poem and ‘The Master’, she writes that it was indeed he ‘who set me free/to prophesy’.¹³

This poem, one of hundreds which address an unnamed woman, can be read biographically as describing her relationship with Annie Winifred Ellerman, known by her pen name Bryher. Biographical interpretation, as demonstrated by Barbara Guest’s essential study of the poet, is difficult to avoid, particularly given H.D.’s novelistic output, in which her personal experiences are re-written as a poetic journey in the Dantean sense. ¹⁴ H.D. also wrote an allusive autobiographical account of her analysis in her Tribute to Freud (1956). But beyond biography, H.D.’s occult-poet is one who reorients Freudianism to serve her own poetic project. It swallows – or somehow outwits – Freudian doxa, so that Eros is no longer the force of official civilisation but of its occult discontents. Duncan reads H.D.’s poems and Tribute to Freud as offering an alternative to psychoanalytic orthodoxy. At the time he was writing psychoanalysis had become part and parcel of the disciplinary psychiatric machine in post-war America. Instead, Duncan read in H.D.’s analysis poems an affirmation of ‘polymorphous perversity’ which insists not only on the power of sexuality but on a poetic sensibility which is continually exposed – hyper-sensitive to the textures of language, unable and unwilling to ‘differentiate between volcanic desire’ and the ‘purple of violets’.