While one might hesitate to classify Hilda Doolittle with the great poets, even though she is the best of the Imagists, one could hardly deny the radical transformation and new direction she has given to the genre by creating the neo-epic Helen in Egypt (1961), which explores the evolution of woman as person and as artist. The poem adheres to the epic conventions in that it is basically a quest which carries its protagonist into war, through the gates of ecstasy, into an underworld experience which includes a meeting with parent figures, and eventually into a new life. The poem departs from the genre pattern in two ways, as do its twentieth-century counterparts The Waste Land, The Bridge, Paterson, the Cantos, and the Maximus Poems: first, its quest is not public but is a private search for self …; second, its questor is not a political, military, or folk hero...