Esoteric Internationalism

For Duncan, H.D. is his poetic ‘Master’. She is a spiritual guide in the development of his poetic capacities and it is reading her poetry as a child that initiates him into the community of the word. He writes, ‘Writing and reading is itself an initiation…so that the body of the world becomes one with his own consciousness, so we learn to find in our life in a literature.’¹ This first initiation through an encounter with the work of another poet will be what inspires Duncan to seek out more poetry, poets, and a community of writers. Duncan continues, ‘To write at all is to dwell in the illusion of language, the rapture of communication that comes as we surrender our troubled individual isolated experiences to the communal consciousness’.² Poetic initiation is the basis for his understanding of an occult international that exceeds the individual. For Duncan this is the basis for a concrete political stance. He writes:

Living in the warp of capitalist oligarchy, we begin to realise that the potentialities of human mind lie hidden in what Pound calls ‘the increment of association’, our individual realisation is curbed wherever there is private interest, our own or another’s. We must struggle for the extension of communal property in order to provide for the safety of our individual potentialities. As, we can see too, in Russia, the safety of the communal potentiality lies in the struggle for individual freedom.³

This illuminating and penetrating observation – which frames capitalism as ‘a warp space’, a network of interpenetrating private interests which suppress the realisation of collective power – emerges from Duncan’s interpretation of Dante’s De Monarchia written between 1312 and 1313, which he reads against the grain. For Duncan, Dante’s text is not a tract on theocratic empire but a source for a heterodox politics, an esoteric internationalism, which he directly links to the political struggle of African Americans, women, and socialists, taking place in the United States at the time he was writing.

Dante isolates the three ‘worthiest concerns’ for poetry as – safety, love and virtue – and then isolates three appropriate means for realising these concerns. The means to realise safety is prowess in arms, to realise Love the poet needs the fire of Eros, and to realise virtue – what is required is the direction of the will. ⁴ One might translate the Dantean notion of safety as armed struggle; love as the cultivation of libidinal forces; and the direction of the will as the strengthening of a poetic ethos of reading, interpreting, and writing. Duncan’s appropriation of Dante as a poetic internationalist is fascinating and worth quoting:

As today, for the sake of the safety of humanity our own prowess of arms would have to be given, were we to take Dante’s sense of true government, to the union of all nations, against the contention of those who direct the United States in the name of private enterprise against communal goods and who are engaged in a disastrous struggle for domination against their counterparts in Russia and China.

We live today, as Dante lived in the thirteenth century and in Florence, in a crisis of just these three worthiest subjects of the poem that must have their definitions not in our personal interests, or we find ourselves at war with our human commonality, not in our national interests, or we find ourselves at war with other nations, but in our human interests, our understanding of the universal term that is Man, the term not of a given reality but of a creation in process.⁵

At the height of the Cold War Duncan finds in Dante and H.D. models for establishing a new criterion of political and aesthetic values. Like thirteenth century Florence, America is ruled by those who operate in the name of ‘private enterprise against communal goods’ and so poetry finds itself facing a crisis of meaning. Dante’s response was to write his Divina Commedia, damning his political enemies to the circles of hell and elevating the virtuous to everlasting harmony in the heavenly spheres. H.D.’s response to the carnage of World War Two was to write her Trilogy which pulsates with images of beauty and terror. Duncan is seeking in The H.D. Book a poetics which will align with the political possibilities of poetic language. The work lays the groundwork for Duncan’s own work in the 1960s in the great trilogy of The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1969) and Bending the Bow (1968).

The H.D. Book is thus the account of how the Dantean value of safety is created through prowess in arms – in this case the poetic prowess of writing as an occulted activity. Dante’s virtue of Eros, cultivated through the fire of Love, is realised through the passionate love of another poet, by which one can enter the greater love. For H.D. and Duncan, this greater love lies at the root of all political struggle. Virtue is directing the will to the collective weave of a language in common which will take the poet beyond the warp of capitalist oligarchy.

An earler version of this paper was presented at the conference “Poetry and/as Politics” at the University of Adelaide in 2023. I’d like to thank the organiser Professor Julian Murphet and the participants for their thoughtful contributions on the day.