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Oread (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

At a glance:

“Oread” well represents H. D.'s early lyrical verse and the Imagist movement of poetry early in the twentieth century:

Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.

Terse and compact, the poem crisply conveys the natural forces at work, or called upon to work, by the series of active verbs and imperatives—“whirl,” “splash,” “hurl,” and “cover.” The hard-hitting lines stress a sense of urgency for nature to fulfill this request.

Pound's assessment of H. D.'s poetry best sums up “Oread” and the ideal verse he saw distinguishing the new American poetry for the century: “objective—no slither; direct—no excessive use of adjective, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It's straight talk, straight as the Greek!”

Bibliography

Burnett, Gary Dean. H. D. Between Image and Epic: The Mysteries of Her Poetics. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1990.

Camboni, Marina, ed. H. D.'s Poetry: “The Meanings That Words Hide”—Essays. Brooklyn, N.Y.: AMS Press, 2003.

Collecott, Diana. H. D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910-1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Connor, Rachel. H. D. and the Image. New York: Palgrave, 2004.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. H. D., the Career of That Struggle. Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1986.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Fritz, Angela DiPace. Thought and Vision: A Critical Reading of H. D.'s Poetry. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988.

Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984.

King, Michael, ed. H. D.: Woman and Poet. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986.

Korg, Jacob. Winter Love: Ezra Pound and H. D. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Laity, Cassandra. H. D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Morris, Adalaide Kirby. How to Live/What to Do: H. D.'s Cultural Poetics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

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