Modernist poetry has a fascination with occult knowledge. It is prevalent in American poet Robert Duncan’s unclassifiable book on Hilda Doolittle, the poet known as H.D. (1886-1961). Duncan’s book is simply titled The H.D. Book, and until it was published in 2011, it had a cult status as one of the great lost works of post-war American poetics. Sections of the text circulated in small poetry magazines, photocopies of which were passed furtively from hand to hand. The H.D. Book was never published in Duncan’s lifetime (1919-1988) and was composed between 1959 and 1964. At the heart of the book is what appears to the 21st century reader as a strange communion between magic and communal politics. Duncan writes, ‘The joy and the splendour exist in magic reciprocity – a property that is not capital; an increment that is not usury.’¹ This definition of poetry as a ‘magic reciprocity’ is not mere metaphor. Duncan really believed in occult internationalism.

Modernist Poetics and the Occult

Duncan’s internationalist vision of the political capacities of poetry might appear strange coming from a text whose reputation is founded on Duncan and H.D.’s obsession with occult knowledge. What does Duncan’s politics have to do with the somewhat uncomfortable fact that many of the great modernist poets were fellow travellers not just of Trotsky but of Madame Blavatsky, the advocate of the syncretic Theosophical movement; or that poets such as W.B. Yeats, attended séances and believed in the possibilities of communing with the dead?

For her part, H.D. promoted poetic telepathy and projected herself into poems as a sibylline figure in arcane communion with ancient Greek gods and medieval angels. She wrote in 1919 of the power of her ‘over-mind’ which, ‘seems a cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is like a closed sea-plant, jelly-fish or anemone.’² These ‘long feelers’ reach down from the head and into ‘the love regions’ and allow the poet to attain a state of ‘vision of the womb’.³ Today such evocations of visionary power are banished to the category of unfortunate excesses, that part of modernism least amenable to politics, at least to a politics that is not immediately flagged as reactionary or suspect. As we are keenly aware in our own time, fascism has its occult followers, as evidenced by Aleksandr Dugin and his Eurasianist movement. ⁴

Duncan is not the only writer who has sought to tease out the confluence of arcane practices and experimental literature in the early part of the 20th century. While his book remains one of the earliest examples, there is an increasingly large body of scholarship interested in mapping the relationship between modernist literature and the flowering of occult thought. The better scholarship on this theme provides a historical picture of the ideological and sociological conditions which gave rise to poetic interest in magic and ritual. Exemplary in this respect is Leon Surette’s study of occult themes in Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and Eileen Gregory’s remarkable study of H.D.’s Hellenism.⁵ But occult modernist scholarship has certain internal structural limitations. These texts have a tendency to reduce the connection between the literary and the spiritual to mere historical proximity. For example, Surette begins with the notes for Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, where he finds references to James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) and Jane Harrison’s Progolomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), demonstrating that anthropological studies of the folktale were part of the same historical conditions which inspired poetic experimentation with myth and ritual in industrial modernity. ⁶

While such methods are certainly valuable, something is lost in their meticulous tracing of historical genealogies. We rarely, if ever get, a sense of the wider political stakes of the occult revival, for example the influence of empire on the development of syncretic spiritualist movements, which emerged in the wake of the near annihilation of the spiritual traditions of colonised people. And neither do we ever get a real sense of the why? Why did poets and writers seek out esoteric traditions to inform their poetic practice? How did their engagement differ from the longstanding relationship between poetry and spirit within Western literature? We can talk about ‘secularisation’, we can talk about the ‘Death of God’, we can talk about the ‘disenchantment of nature’ in the dialectic of Enlightenment until we’re green in the gills, but we are still missing something. We miss how occultism as a broader cultural field, and as a practice, coincided in some important ways with poetry as a practice and way of life in the early 20th century.

Duncan’s H.D. Book stands out because it is primarily concerned with how H.D.’s interest in the occult is entwined with her poetic practice. He writes:

I am not a literary scholar, nor a historian, not a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions nor an occultist. I am a student of, I am searching out, a poetics.⁷

In his search for a poetics Duncan provides an account of H.D.’s work that is deeply personal, meticulously researched, and which links this research to the question of poetic method. What is revealed in his palimpsestic book is why H.D. found possibilities for poetic expression in the reading, study and poetic incorporation of mystical materials. Occultism, like poetry, is a way of life which suggests an intimate relationship between everyday experiences and spiritual forces. While H.D. may evoke angelic hierarchies, she is just as attuned to the capacity for revelation in a sea poppy.⁸ At heart, both practices understand language as a fundamental source of spiritual illumination.
This is evoked in Duncan’s notion of H.D.’s incantatory relationship to poetic language or, what Pound calls, ‘the increment of association’ within the word.⁹ Language is a social practice that is fundamentally collective. It is informed by histories of use and is the repository of accumulated social knowledge. Poetry is a mode which attends to the grain of language, bringing out the history of associations – both lexical and social – within specific words. It is this associational quality which gives the modernist occult its political capacities. For Duncan and H.D., the poetic word is profoundly opposed to private property. Property is understood as not only an economic relation but a semiotic and psycho-sexual regime of repression and containment. To release the associational possibilities lying dormant in the word is the labour of Duncan’s occult-poet. It is also the power of H.D.’s work. So how do these associational possibilities of the word emerge? How does language as a property in common manage to outflank the property relation in occult poetics?