1In 1917, Amy Lowell published Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, a volume of literary criticism including a chapter on H.D., in which, consciously or not, she juxtaposed two approaches to H.D.’s poetry:

On the first appearance of these short, concentrated poems, many “smart” critics likened them to carved cherry-stones, and dismissed them as something too inconsiderable to be taken seriously. […] But “cherry-stones” was a poor simile, “exquisite cameos and intaglios,” would have been a more exact definition. These poems are fragile as shells, and as transparent, but their modelling is as carefully done as that of a statue of Parian marble.1

2The second line of criticism is illustrated as follows:

“H.D.”’s poems achieve a beauty of cadence which has been surpassed by no other vers libriste. Indeed, her subtle changing rhythms are almost without an equal. Never, in her verse, do we find a prose suggestion. […] Her poems are kept to a key; the key of haunted woodland, of nymph-bearing sea. Reading them, we hear pipe strains lost in the mists of forests, we hear voices calling through the wash of waves.2

3It is evident that both extracts discuss the formal properties of H.D.’s verse, but that they do so in different terms: those of the eye in the first one, and those of the ear in the second.

4While this paper raises questions about public speaking and public reading, about the spoken word and the sound of the voice, critical discourse on high modernist poetry has for decades privileged the visual line of criticism. Several interrelated factors explain this. Up until now, it has often been maintained that the modernist movement campaigned against rhetoric, battling the conventions of collectively codified oratorical discourse and the “flowers” of rhetorical stylistics.3 As to H.D.’s critical reception, the beginning of her career as an Imagiste enabled her inclusion in this anti-discursive, strongly visually-oriented and anti-aural (as well as anti-oral) aesthetic tradition centered around Hulme, Pound, Lewis and others.4 T.E. Hulme, for example, envisioned a type of verse to be read in a distanced, scholarly manner, and created by a method of “recording impressions by visual images in distinct lines”.5 This fed a serious, professional type of academic reading valorized by the New Critics who treated poems as crystalline, gemlike objects (and while it is true that the New Critics largely ignored H.D., Lowell’s invocation of a statue already anticipates this). On top of that, the main trend of scholarly commentary on H.D.’s involvement with silent film, stimulating though it is in itself, has reinforced this primacy of the visual. Silent film as a purely pictorial “language of images” can be opposed to conventional language, human voices, and rhetorical speech. It closely corresponds with imagism’s fantasy of the motivated, transparent one-on-one relationship between the sign and its meaning, as for instance in Pound’s Chinese ideogram. Moreover, it is well known that H.D. and her entourage at the magazine Close Up strongly resisted the “talkies” when sound came to the cinema around 1927.6 Within this context, H.D.’s poems can then be, and have fruitfully been, subjected to readings that activate the terminology of cinematic technique, montage and the close-up being the most obvious.7

5However, H.D.’s work in and on film can also be studied to the benefit of Amy Lowell’s second option, the non-visual one.8 In order to start thinking in a systematic way about the voices Lowell heard, or about poetry performance, I approach H.D.’s film essays not from the angle of cinematic technique, but of silent film performance: that is, of the human body and its communicative means put to artistic use. Silent film, as the registration and reproduction of moving bodies, demands of the performer a sort of pantomime, an histrionics, or a gestural rhetoric of facial expression and bodily movement.

6Here we have a high modernist poet who was also a performer, and who reflected upon embodied performance in her writings. It is clear that this performance was conceived by H.D. as a public one, and even intended for a large audience. This seems counterintuitive, considering the critique of Hollywood mass culture in Close Up, and the high-brow, avant-garde intentions of the POOL group. Yet, Close Up’s resistance to the coming of sound film was precisely an effect of their reverence for the medium of film as constituting a universal language. This dream of “speaking” directly to everyone implied the dream of a very large, worldwide spectatorship, which was illustrated by the last thought of H.D.’s essay on “The Student of Prague,” where she foresaw “a universal language, a universal art open alike to the pleb and the initiate” (24). Poetry, however, remains a verbal, if not vocal art form. Its alignment with images and pictures is at best metaphorical, while its kinship with the speaking voice went unquestioned for most of its history, and remained powerful until the beginning of the 20th century.9 Theories and practices of poetry recitation and elocution (the reading aloud of literary texts from the page), ubiquitous up to the First World War, propagated the phonocentric assumption that the human voice, in alliance with the sense of hearing, was the most suitable vehicle for the communication of thoughts and emotions, and thus for the full realization or actualization of poetic texts.10

7Consequently, the central question is: how did H.D., by writing on film, but doubtlessly also by looking at what was happening in other fields such as theater, elocution, and the new media landscape—it is important to contextualize her dual role as poet and performer in this way—negotiate a performance style, and a means of communicating, of speaking, to an audience, that would eventually lead her to record her poetry for reproduction and dissemination to an audience that was at least theoretically endless in size and diversity.11 Ultimately, what kind of performative rhetoric did H.D. devise?

8 In her film essays, H.D. discussed, among other things, (1) a few do’s and don’ts for the film actor, (2) the specificity of film as an art form, and (3) the spectator’s experience when watching a movie. First, the actor. In the first installment of “Cinema and the Classics” as well as in the Borderline pamphlet, H.D. wrote about the art of acting. Contrasting film to stage acting, H.D. stated that “the novice must learn primarily not only not to over-act, but actually you might almost say, not to act.” (“Borderline,” 229) Describing the actor as an instrument which has to be able to transfer into action the director’s ideas, H.D. envisioned the actor as pure body, as a repertoire of gestures, or more precisely, as pure sign. That is of course why an actor for H.D. could figure as a hieroglyph: the gesture of silent film had to be symbolic. As Laura Marcus has pointed out, H.D.’s writings echoed the terms of Edward Gordon Craig’s advocacy of a creative theater as opposed to dominant theatrical realism.12 Craig valued impersonality in an actor, which was evident in his use of masks—the mask of course took an important place in H.D.’s thinking too—and in his concept of the “Über-marionette,” who was to act out the will of the director according to a studied system of symbolic gestures.13 Craig, it could be argued, opposed the artificial naturalness of realistic theater by proposing a natural artificiality in the form of the impersonal performer. Similarly, H.D. admired the actor who could at once become a character and typify a symbolic emblem, foregrounding Greta Garbo’s pre-Hollywood career as the prime example (in “Cinema and the Classics I: Beauty”).

9Secondly, I want to point out the importance accorded to medium specificity, most obvious in the pages of Close Up in the celebration of film as a purely pictorial, purely visual art form. As cinema’s essence is the visual representation of moving bodies and objects, it is precisely that essence that is typically valued most highly by avant-garde practitioners of the art of cinema. Moreover, Anne Friedberg has pointed out that the early reception of Borderline, which was often but not always negative, acknowledged this feature, defining the film as an example of “pure cinema.”14 Here again, Craig could be mentioned, because in other arts, such as poetry and drama, similar delineations of the art’s specific essence were devised. Craig maintains, for instance, that dramatic poetry, as opposed to drama, should rely on the speaking voice only.15

10 A final aspect of H.D.’s reflections is the spectator’s experience. Of the highest importance for H.D., as well as for other Close Up contributors, such as Dorothy Richardson, was the notion of the spectator as a participant in the creative process, actively imagining what is not immediately presented by the film or by the actor. According to H.D., mainstream Hollywood cinema negated this active role for the spectator, most manifestly so after its introduction of synchronized speech, the infamous “Movietone.” H.D. wrote:

Voice follows face, face follows voice, face and voice with all their subtle blending are accurately and mechanically welded. […] Each alone would have left us to our dreams. The two together proved too much. The screen image, a mask, a sort of doll or marionette was somehow mechanized and robbed of the thing behind the thing that has grown to matter so much to the picture adept. ( “Cinema and the Classics III: The Mask and the Movietone,” 115)

11The “Movietone” and the speaking film character left nothing to the spectator, and simply destroyed for H.D. all that was valuable in cinema: the impersonal, symbolic acting style was completely lost, and cinema’s specificity as purely visual, pictorial medium was corrupted. As Susan McCabe has suggested, H.D. deplored the fact that the introduction of speaking characters suggested an illusory wholeness.16 “This screen projection is not a mask, it is a person, a personality,” lamented H.D. ( “Cinema and the Classics III: The Mask and the Movietone,” 116). Body, face, and voice were reintegrated to present a character as a unified individual subject, which left nothing to the imagination of the spectator. In other words, it recast the cinema to the condition of the artificial naturalness (expressed by H.D. in the formulation “mechanical welding”) of realistic drama, resisted by the cinematic avant-garde, as well as by Craig’s creative theater, and modernist poetic drama.

12After this, it may seem hopeless to find a positive potential setting for vocal performance. Yet, there is an opening that allows to make the transition from what we know about H.D.’s idea of performance to the public reading of poetry, provided a careful examination of comments on vocality by and about H.D. is brought to bear on her poetry and her own reading (i. e. voicing) of it.

13In the “Movietone” essay, the voice was perceived through the lens of technology: the robot, the automaton, the speaking doll. ( “Cinema and the Classics III: The Mask and the Movietone,” 115) The technological device that looms behind those figures is the phonograph, developed by Edison in 1877. The idea of the storage and mechanical reproduction of sound fascinated scientists and artists alike, and initiated fantasies of listening to the voices of the dead,17 while at the same time doing for the ear what cinema did for the eye (to anachronistically reverse Edison’s statement about the kinetoscope): isolating one sense, the acoustic, by producing only a voice.18 That is why the phonograph was associated with the “disembodied voice”.19 If the line of medium specificity is pursued (as above for the medium of film), this disembodied voice, not in any way “mechanically welded” to another sense, was a “pure voice” (like Borderline’s “pure cinema”) which could appear perfectly suited to poetry recitation, because it offered the possibility of impersonality, and left much of the speaking persona to be imagined by the listener (i. e. the ideal of audience participation). Significantly, in the fragment quoted above, H.D. admitted that the mechanically reproduced voice alone could be valuable as an artistic object (“Each alone would have left us to our dreams”).

14Returning once more to Lowell’s critical comments, H.D.’s poetry, it turns out, was imagined as a recording device, playing back the sounds and the voices of the past:

Reading them [i. e. H.D.’s poems], we hear pipe strains lost in the mists of forests, we hear voices calling through the wash of waves. They remind me of a story I once read by a French author, in which an ancient shell preserved within it a few moments of a siren’s song. I seem to hear in ‘H.D. ’’s work echoes of a beauty long departed.”20

15Thanks to Friedrich Kittler, it is strikingly easy to identify the story by Lowell’s French author as Maurice Renard’s “La mort et le coquillage,” written in 1907, and foregrounded in Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter as a story which epitomized the phonographic fantasy of the storage and reproduction of sounds from the past and voices of the dead.21

16In a surprising tandem, Lowell and Kittler thus open a path to read certain poems by H.D. as mobilizing the disembodied voice of the phonograph, which allows for a mode of speaking entirely dependent upon the “pure voice,” a communicative situation which is, by virtue of being its exact reverse, similar to that of silent film, in that the performer only has one sign system at her disposal. Mark Morrisson has identified this concept of the “pure voice” as a particularly modern ideal of vocal performance, advocated by Yeats, Eliot and others as a perfect form of neutral mediation allowing for a strong authorial presence.22 Since H.D.’s film writings revealed her preference for a depersonalized type of embodied performance, certain poems that invite a speaker to voice the words of a poetic persona can be read in this light.

17In her book on modernist dance and solo performance, Carrie Preston recognized in the so-called “persona poems” the genre of the dramatic monologue, a genre that had always been attractive to professional and amateur poetry reciters and elocutionists, and remained so until well into the 20th century.23 In poems such as “A Dead Priestess Speaks,” “Eurydice,” and “Pygmalion,” the reader naturally adopts the voice of the persona. Even in “Projector II,” a poem celebrating the god of light (and cinema), Apollo himself suddenly starts speaking from the second stanza of the third part onward. In fact, it seems that a significant number of the personae themselves are, by their nature, bodiless figures: sometimes they are gods—Apollo is a good example, because his oracular messages are mediated by the Pythian. Sometimes they are ghosts in the underworld—Eurydice, Persephone, or at the beginning of Helen in Egypt, “the hosts/surging beneath the Walls, / (no more than I) are ghosts” (1).

18If Preston is right in finding in these poems H.D.’s participatory aesthetic (the reader is activated and lends her voice to the mythical persona), it could be added that it is first and foremost the technologically mediated (phonographic or radiophonic) voice that allows for a disembodied and impersonal speaker. Thinking this through, the ideal vocal performance could in fact offer the equivalent of the visual hieroglyph: a kind of symbolic use of the voice (in terms of tone, rhythm, stress), with which the speaker, while becoming the persona, typifies the character as a symbolic emblem. The style of reading H.D. herself used in her recording of Helen in Egypt lends itself to be discussed in these terms.24 First of all, it is evident that the poetic parts are read in a different way from the prose fragments framing them, which indicates that H.D. sought in poetry reading something more than just a vivid but naturalistic rendering of the lines (i. e. close to expressive everyday speech). Even though not many critical tools for the analysis of the spoken word are readily available, it can be argued that H.D. seems to recite in a studied way, which is not exactly chanting, but not realistic voice acting either. Her heightened vocalization depends more on rhythm, vowel length, pause, and stress. This stylized use of the voice adds to the poetic text a symbolic significance, partly facilitated by the separation of sound from vision through a technological medium, which at the same time demands a greater imaginative investment of the listener.

19What this paper aimed to show is that, leaving aside for a moment the dominant visual and textual paradigm of criticism of an allegedly anti-rhetorical modernism, a new understanding can be gained of the way H.D. conceived of the nature and function of her own poetry by situating it within contemporary thinking on the oral, performative, and public and audience-oriented uses of poetry. H.D.’s own choice for a technologically mediated type of vocal poetry performance (recording for reproduction) confirms the model of the ideal, impersonal and symbolic, vocal performance that can be constructed by connecting H.D.’s reflections on film performance to her persona poems that invite the participation of a reader or speaker. Apollo, H.D.’s god of cinema, after all remains the god of poetry and the god of the poet-performer.