Trilogy

Joyce Lorraine Beck (Essay Date Spring 1982)

SOURCE: Beck, Joyce Lorraine. "Dea, Awakening: A Reading of H. D.'s Trilogy." San Jose Studies 8, no. 2 (spring 1982): 59-70.

In the following essay, Beck finds Trilogy to be a noteworthy feminist work because it exhibits an emerging spiritual consciousness and awareness embodied and symbolized in a central female figure, the Awakening Dea.

H. D., Hilda Doolittle Aldington, is best known as the co-founder—with T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and others—of the pre-World War I English Imagist movement in poetry. However, while it has long been acknowledged that Pound, Eliot, and Williams moved beyond Imagism to more comprehensive and meaningful visions in Four Quartets, the Cantos, and Patterson, the longer and later "major works" of their female contemporary and colleague, H. D., have until recently gone largely unpraised, uncriticized, and unrecognized. Rachel Blau DuPlessis'...