This late collection, written in the last years of H.D.'s life, is a testament to the fine ear and mythic sense of a poet who is now recognized as one of the greatest of her generation.

This late collection, written in the last years of H.D.'s life, is a testament to the fine ear and mythic sense of a poet who is now recognized as one of the greatest of her generation. H. D.’s (Hilda Doolittle, 1884-1961) late poems of search and longing represent the mature achievement of a poet who has come increasingly to be recognized as one of the most important of her generation. The title poem and other long pieces in this collection ("Sagesse" and "Winter Love") were written between 1957 and her death four years later, and are heretofore unpublished, except in fragments. We can see now in proper context her fine ear for the free line, and understand why other poets, such as Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, find so much to admire in H. D.’s work. As in her earlier books, one level of H.D.’s significant poetic statement derives from her intimate knowledge of and identification with classical Greek and arcane cultures; taken together, these elements make up the poet’s own personal myth. Norman Holmes Pearson, H. D’s friend and literary executor, has contributed an illuminating foreword to this impressive collection. H. D.’s (Hilda Doolittle, 1884-1961) late poems of search and longing represent the mature achievement of a poet who has come increasingly to be recognized as one of the most important of her generation. The title poem and other long pieces in this collection ("Sagesse" and "Winter Love") were written between 1957 and her death four years later, and are heretofore unpublished, except in fragments. We can see now in proper context her fine ear for the free line, and understand why other poets, such as Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, find so much to admire in H. D.’s work. As in her earlier books, one level of H.D.’s significant poetic statement derives from her intimate knowledge of and identification with classical Greek and arcane cultures; taken together, these elements make up the poet’s own personal myth. Norman Holmes Pearson, H. D’s friend and literary executor, has contributed an illuminating foreword to this impressive collection.

“H. D's wit, sense of rhythm, and control of language prove the inadequacy of the imagist label that is so often applied to this writer.” —Library Journal This autobiographical novel, an interior self-portrait of the poet H. D. (1886-1961) is what can best be described as a "find,' a posthumous treasure. In writing HERmione, H.D. returned to a year in her life that was "peculiarly blighted." She was in her early twenties––"a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place… Waves to fight against, to fight against alone…'I am Hermione Gart, a failure’––she cried in her dementia, 'l am Her, Her, Her."' She had failed at Bryn Mawr, she felt hemmed in by her family, she did not yet know what she was going to do with her life. The return from Europe of the wild-haired George Lowndes (Ezra Pound) expanded her horizons but threatened her sense of self. An intense new friendship with Fayne Rabb (Frances Josepha Gregg), an odd girl who was, if not lesbian, then certainly of bisexual bent, brought an atmosphere that made her hold on everyday reality more tenuous. This stormy course led to mental breakdown, then to a turning point and a new beginning as her own true self, as "Her”––the poet H.D. Perdita Schaffner, H.D.'s daughter, who can remember back to the time in 1927 when her mother was barricaded with her typewriter behind a locked door, working on this very novel, has provided a charming and telling introduction.

Through the poetry of Wallace Stevens has been studied from a variety of critical perspectives, most critics share the view that Stevens is a secular poet who refuses religious definitions of man and nature. His major subject, it is thought, is poetry, which in its broadest sense stands as synecdoche for the possibilities that inhere in the mind engaged in creating itself even as it creates its art. This study confirms that Stevens's major concern is indeed poetry, but it proposes that when Steven speaks of the peerless poem qualified by such epithets as "grand" or "central" or "ultimate" or "supreme," he is not referring to the objective artifact with which we commonly associate the term but is rather outlining the contours of the Hermetic transcendental Man encountered in the course of spiritual meditation. Accordingly, art, in Steven's view, is a secondary or "lesser" form eventually superseded by the soul metamorphosed into an image of deity - what Stevens called "pure poetry" or the "ultimate poem." Woodman traces the appearance of the Heavenly Man of spiritual alchemy in "Owl's Clover," Steven's longest poem, and in the figure of the hero, a major motif in Stevens's work from the thirties on. She then considers the alchemical tradition to clarify the uses Steven made of its symbolic system. Succeeding chapters consider the relation of the Hermetic Man to the "supreme fiction"; the spiritual reciprocity between imagination and reality - variations of the Hermetic doctrine of correspondence; the decreation and recreation of self and nature that constitute the metamorphic stages of Hermetic meditation; and the Hermetic theory of transcendental perception that lies at the core of Steven's account of human transformation. The final chapter turns to Steven's native Pennsylvania to suggest the means by which he may have encountered the Rosicrucian tradition (the corporate form of modern Hermetism) that appears to have profoundly influenced his creative life.