These pagan poets: Edgar Garcia on Robert Duncan, H.D. and Ezra Pound

Edgar Garcia gives Robert Duncan and Ezra Pound a thorough treatment for MAKE Magazine in his double review, "Twentieth-Century Heresies: A Review of 'The H.D. Book' and 'New Selected Poems and Translations'". Duncan's long-awaited book on H.D. still resists the literary establishment, writes Garcia, and though it's comparable in scale and implication to Hugh Kenner's landmark study of Pound:

[The H.D. Book] is nevertheless filled with dreamy autobiographical reflection, opening with an account of the first poem he ever heard (the quintessential Imagism poem, “Heat,” by H.D.). Bringing a memory of the high school teacher in Bakersfield who read it to him to bear on his lifelong feeling that poetry was a matter that “seemed to a contain personal revelation,” he concludes that this teacher (Miss Keough) admitted, initiated, even baptized him into the mystical “rites of participation” in Poetry. Mingled with this conversion was the phenomenon of falling in love (with her and other teachers). And mingled with falling in love was “the communication of self.” Poetry was from the outset about communicating personally with a kindred spirit. It was an interpersonal, if not an internuminal, art.

Interestingly, Garcia looks not only at the canonization of the three poets and the 20th-century movement that is Imagism, but at their spiritual and occult leanings (at least textually):

[Duncan's] links with shamanistic practice place [him] in a group with which he seldom associated. He was, that is, also connected to Native American poetries. In his mind, Sigmund Freud was to H.D. as the Yaqui Don Juan Matus was to Carlos Castaneda, “H.D. being an initiate of Freud himself.” But, whereas Don Juan’s lessons on Nagual sorcery took place on the mysterious plane between “the world of ordinary people and the world of sorcerers,” a plane that stretched from Sonora to the spectral Ixtlan, Freud’s lesson for H.D. on unlocking the magical potential of trauma and Träume took place in a forbidden world of relations between psychotherapy and the Orphic mysteries. According to Duncan:

It is like a dream but not a dream, this going out into the world of the poem, inspired by the directions of an other self. It has kinship too with the séance of the shaman, and in this light we recognize the country of the poem as being like the shaman’s land of the dead or the theosophical medium’s astral plane. In the story of Orpheus there is a hint of how close the shaman and the poet may be, the singer and the seer.

"But the greatest of all Duncan’s heresies might have been to have even read H.D. at all," writes Garcia. Find out what he means by reading the entire piece here.