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More Beautiful, More Intense? HD’s Poetics of Comparison
“I will not reason and compare,” writes Blake; “my business is to create.” But poetry is a practice of comparison. That’s what I want to show today through a reading of H.D.’s first book, Sea Garden. Poetry is a practice of immanent measure. It is the creation of comparison. It constructs relations among relative intensities, it weighs these, and it manifests a decision between them. I want to say that this practice of construction, measure, and decision is the most intimate practice of our daily lives, of our sexuality, of our political engagements. We could call this practice “comparison.” Poetry distills it.
Blake’s Newton (1795) figures Enlightenment rationality as instrumental measure. Euclidean geometry provides a standard of form which bends the mind and body to its rule. The devices with which one drafts the figures of these standard forms render reason an instrument of conformity. In a word: reason conforms to measure, rather than creating it. This standard of rationality, which we might call instrumental measure, is what Blake rejects in favor of imaginative creation.
In favor of. Already, the phrase registers the fact that Blake’s formulation is itself a comparison: “I will not reason and compare; my business is to create.” Creation is measured against comparison. Imagination is implicitly measured against reason. And the soul gravitates toward one pole of the relation. Blake’s artistic practice, we could say, tends toward creation rather than comparison. “My tendency is correct,” writes John Cage. And this is what Blake seems to be saying as well. We note that this tendency, this inclination—which is no doubt felt as an immediate affect, the felt inclination of one’s whole being—is also a judgment. It is articulated as a decision between one of two alternatives. What I want to show is that this decision hinges upon the relation of creation and comparison, of affect and reason, to different modalities of measure.
We can see that Blake’s whole art is, in fact, a practice of comparison, of measuring relative intensities. He drafts, engraves, and paints differential intensities through exemplary relations among figure, line, and color. Consider, for example, the relation between the figural and compositional energies of two plates, The Ancient of Days and Glad Day.
In the first, the Demiurge whom Blake names Urizen assumes the same posture as his Newton, bound within a sphere and hunched over looking down in an act of instrumental measure, subjecting the cosmos to the standardized rule of mathematical reason. This is how Blake figures the creation of the material world by God the Father. It is not really a creation at all, but rather of subjugation to the rule of reason, represented here as a patriarch.
In Glad Day, on the other hand, the figure whom Blake calls Albion extends his limbs to their full extent as the light of creation streams out of his body rather than down from on high. Blake’s Christian humanism figures the immanence of creative energy—imagination—as the human body realizing its own capacities. The relation between these two plates implicitly posits this immanent realization against the subjection of the human to the measure of a higher authority.
The construction of such relations is a practice of comparison. It is a practice that subsumes the entirety of Blake’s art, wherein the illustration of his elaborate mythology involves the composition of differences between figures which are indeed types, though of Blake’s own invention. His art involves not only the weighing of relative intensities—registered as compositional energies of figure, line, and color—but also implicit acts of judgment and valuation. A relation of intensities is felt, the soul inclines toward one or the other, and imaginative creation is the construction of this differential inclination in the heat and the craft of composition. It is this practice of comparison not as instrumental measure, but as immanent measure, which Blake calls creation.
Such a practice is at the core of H.D.’s art in Sea Garden. In the poem “Sea Violet,” for example:
The white violet
is scented on its stalk,
the sea-violet
fragile as agate,
lies fronting all the wind
among the torn shells
on the sand bank.The greater blue violets
flutter on the hill,
but who would change for these
who would change for these
one root of the white sort?Violet
your grasp is frail
on the edge of the sand-hill,
but you catch the light—
frost, a star edges with its fire.Description. Situation. Comparison. Decision. Invocation. The white violet is described as “scented on its stalk,” “fragile as agate.” It is situated on the sand bank, fronting all the wind among the torn shells. It is compared to the blue violets, which are “greater” and which flutter on the hill. But the relative greatness of these blue violets consists only in their size, a standardized metric. The blue violets are larger than the white violet, they are plural, and they are situated more conspicuously. But they are of an inferior intensity. An inclination and a decision upon this point is registered by the insistence of a rhetorical question:
but who would change for these
who would change for these
one root of the white sort?The singularity of the white violet, of the sea violet, is then summoned into the poem through an invocation that erases its epithets, displaces all relation, and renders it absolute rather than relative. Decided upon, the white violet or sea violet is now addressed simply as “Violet,” its singular nomination claiming a line of its own to begin the last stanza. The grasp of the violet is frail—it is tenuous, fragile, at risk—but it catches the light. The work of relation in the poem now turns from comparison to synthesis as the terrestrial violet catches the celestial light of the sun, and the poem is consumed in the cold white heat of metaphor.
frost, a star edges with its fire.
The poem works through comparison toward a true relation figured as consummation. The poem weighs relative intensities, negates the very terms of this relation through decision, and explodes into the singularity of metaphorical making: poiesis. “I will not reason and compare; my business is to create,” says Blake, and H.D’s poem ultimately says the same thing—but it arrives at the business of creation through a practice of comparison.
My claim is that the making of poiesis, through comparison, is the core of lyric practice. Consider Wordsworth’s famous demonstration:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.The lyric “I” comes into relation with a host of golden daffodils, and these, in turn, are are situated in their environment and drawn into relation with its elements through the poetic construction of the lyric speaker. The daffodils are “beside the lake, beneath the trees;” they are “fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” Prepositions—“beside,” “beneath,” “in”—establish relations of contiguity which situate the daffodils within the relational space of the poem.
The daffodils are “continuous as” the stars that shine; like these, they “stretched in a never ending line.” Again, terrestrial flowers are figured as the equal of celestial stars, in this case by virtue of their sheer multiplicity (“ten thousand saw I at a glance”) which seems to exceed on all sides the parameters of any determinate count. The waves dance “beside” the daffodils, but whereas the flowers equal the stars in continuity and number, they “outdid” the sparkling waves in glee. The glee of the daffodils exceeds that of the waves. The daffodils are more intense than the waves and they are continuous as the stars.
In the past tense, the speaker relates these relations. He relates a scene, configures it, and weighs relative intensities within it through a practice of comparison. In the present tense of the final stanza—the space of powerful emotion recollected in tranquillity—the scene is interiorized, and the pleasure of its incorporation into the bliss of solitude melds the affective life of the heart with the sensory experience of the daffodils through the figure of the dance. Again, the act or practice of lyric consists in a practice of comparison yielding the synthetic singularity of metaphor through the fusion of the outer and inward eye, of sensory experience and affective life.
I am not really saying anything about this poem we do not already know. To put it concisely: Wordsworth’s lyric subject is the affective synthesis of a sensory singularity. I merely note the practice of comparison which, within the world of the poem, renders the daffodils the singularity that they are.
Each of H.D.’s flower poems in Sea Garden—constituting a series that punctuates the collection—expresses a preference. And in each case this preference, in turn, expresses an implicit inclination of affective life through relations among sensory intensities. For example, “Sea Poppies”:
Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?Or the first two stanzas of “Sea Rose”:
Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meager flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem—
you are caught in the drift.Note the formal density of H.D.’s rendering of the harsh rose in this instance—particularly the important role played by vowel sounds here and throughout her work: “meager flower, thin.” I do not think I know of another instance of English poetry that concentrates the sense of a line so intensely in a system of phonetic relations as this one. The long open “o” sound in “flower” typifies, if you will, the open softness that one might associate with flowers in general—with the poetic figure of the flower. But this figure and this phoneme are qualified by the pinched, tight vowel sound of “meager,” redoubling the sense a relation between subject (“flower”) and predicate (“meager”) with a relation between phonemic moods. And this relation—its effect—is then registered or expressed by a synthetic term, “thin,” held between commas at the end of the line. It is as though the qualification of “meager” has pinched the open sound of “flower” into a thin “i,” which sublates the relation of “meager” and “flower” not only at the level of the phoneme but also the grapheme, the open space of the “o” pressed together into the narrow line of the “i,” tenuous and abstract, as if having fallen out of the word “stint,” above. The practice of comparison operates not only at the level of meaning or content in H.D.’s poems, but more immediately at the level of sound or form, where their sense resides in its most concentrated state.
The language of H.D.’s flower poems obviously carries sexual implications: the fragrance of the wide-spread flower, or the relation of the harsh rose, stint of petals, to the wet rose. The erotic cartography of female anatomy in H.D.’s poems, and the exploration of differential drives and bisexual desires that it performs, has been widely noted. Yet we need to ask not only how sexuality is figured in these poems, but what it is. If we say that sexuality is a psychosomatic field of differential intensities, then we might begin to see how the lyric practice of comparison—the weighing of relative intensities as an act of immanent measure—bears upon the poetic exploration of desire. The field of sexual experience is at once intensely localized and amorphously diffuse. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty says, sexuality “has internal links with the whole active and cognitive being” such that we give our entire lives over to it. “Sexuality is neither transcended in human life,” he writes, “nor bound to its center through unconscious representations. It is at all times present like an atmosphere.”The Oedipal Complex of Freudian theory, for example, is not really a relation of determinate desires. As a phantasy, it is not so much a scenario as a field of affective impulses and inclinations. Such a phantasy saturates the psychosomatic experience of childhood to a degree that is essentially without measure, blurring and eliding the consistency of figures, bodies, or psychological subjects. Or in Freud’s case study of hysteria, Dora “speaks of Frau K’s adorable white body in terms more befitting a lover than a rival.” Freud deduces that within the complex field of her unconscious phantasies, Dora’s desire for Frau K is stronger, more deeply rooted, than her desire for Herr K or her father. But in what does this desire consist? Frau K speaks to Dora, as a child, about the secrets of her marriage. She introduces Dora an illicit catalog of sexual perversions through the pages of a sex manual. When she visits, Dora sleeps in Frau K’s bed with her while Herr K sleeps elsewhere. These intimacies construct a cathexis, a bond and a preferential inclination within which the female voice, the female body, the experience of feminine secrecy and seduction becomes more desirable than the crude bodies and straightforward proposals of male specimens. The phantasy is an affective inclination that subsumes the whole of experience by virtue of its relation to other elements of that experience. There is no “no” in the unconscious, Freud teaches. This is why Melville’s Bartleby says, “I would prefer not to.” And we can say that Dora’s rejection of Herr K does not express a negation but an unconscious preference for his wife. Or not, rather, for his wife, but for the singularity of her adorable white body.
Thus, the stakes these inclinations, the stakes of the affective singularity of a preference, could not be higher. The field of sexual desire is unmeasured, ambivalent, amorphous, and yet relentlessly determinate. Within the unmeasured field of sexual desire, the poems in Sea Garden take the measure of its determinations. In “The Helmsman,” lesbian eroticism is figured as a forgetful idyll or pastoral retreat, an escape inland from the stringent rigors of the sea:
O be swift—
we have always known you wanted us.We fled inland with our flocks,
we pastured them in hollows,
cut off from the wind
and the salt track of the marsh.We worshipped inland—
we stepped past wood-flowers,
we forgot your tang,
we brushed wood-grass.We wandered from pine-hills
through oak and scrub-oak tangles,
we broke hyssop and bramble,
we caught flower and new bramble-fruit
in our hair: we laughed
as each branch whipped back,
we tore our feet in half buried rocks
and knotted roots and acorn-cups.We forgot—we worshipped,
we parted green from green,
we sought further thickets,
we dipped our ankles
through leaf-mould and earth,
and wood and wood-bank enchanted us—and the feel of the clefts in the bark,
and the slope between tree and tree—
and a slender path strung field to field
and wood to wood
and hill to hill
and the forest after it.We forgot—for a moment
tree-resin, tree-bark,
sweat of a torn branch
were sweet to the taste.We were enchanted with the fields,
the tufts of course grass
in the shorter grass—
we loved all this.But now, our boat climbs—hesitates—drops—
climbs—hesitates—crawls back—
climbs—hesitates—
O be swift—
we have always known you wanted us.The inevitability of a return from the earthly pastoral escape to the tang and the determinate rhythms of the sea is registered by the simple consignment of the inland idyll to the past tense: “we fled,” “we worshipped,” “we wandered,” “we forgot,” “we were enchanted.” But now the circular structure of the poem returns us from the forgetfulness of “we” to the singular determination of “you,” which seems to be the determination of being taken. It is not that “we have always wanted you” but rather, “we have always known you wanted us.” Desire is the desire of the Other, and the poem knows this. “We have always known” this. That there is ultimately no escape from the determination of our desire as the desire of the Other is the poem’s concession to necessity, to fate, to what the Greeks called ananke. Here, preference itself is ephemeral, fleeting, inessential. For a moment “tree-resin, tree-bark, / sweat of a torn branch / were sweet to the taste.” “We loved all this.” But now, what must be is. Inclination, in this poem—the eventual or tendential necessity of a return to sea—is not so much a matter of preference but of destiny. It is not so much the wood and the sea that are compared—let alone lesbian or heterosexual desire—but rather the sporadic contingency of pleasure and the tendential necessity of inclination that are compared. It is through the comparison of contingency and necessity themselves that the truth of one’s desire becomes manifest—whether one likes it or not.
Let me try to unfold the consequences of this approach to H.D.’s art through a reading of what I consider her most profound and important poem—a poem which encounters, in the course of its articulation, the essential problems and possibilities of lyric craft. The poem is titled “The Gift.”
Instead of pearls—a wrought clasp—
a bracelet—will you accept this?You know the script—
you will start, wonder:
what is left, what phrase,
after last night? This:The world is yet unspoiled for you,
you wait, expectant—
you are like the children
who haunt your own steps
for chance bits—a comb
that may have slipped,
a gold tassel, unravelled,
plucked from your scarf,
twirled by your slight fingers
into the street—
a flower dropped.Do not think me unaware,
I who have snatched at you
as the street-child clutched
at the seed-pearls you spilt
that hot day
when your necklace snapped.Do not dream that I speak
as one defrauded of delight,
sick, shaken by each heart-beat
or paralyzed, stretched at length,
who gasps:
these ripe pears
are bitter to the taste,
this spiced wine, poison, corrupt.
I cannot walk—
who would walk?
Life is a scavenger’s pit—I escape—
I only, rejecting it,
lying here on this couch.Your garden sloped to the beach,
myrtle overran the paths,
honey and amber flecked each leaf,
the citron-lily head—
one among many—
weighed there, over-sweet.The myrrh-hyacinth
spread across low slopes,
violets streaked black ridges
through the grass.The house, too, was like this,
over painted, over lovely—
the world is like this.Sleepless nights,
I remember the initiates,
their gesture, their calm glance.
I have heard how in rapt thought,
in vision, they speak
with another race,
more beautiful, more intense than this.
I could laugh—
more beautiful, more intense?Perhaps that other life
is contrast always to this.
I reason:
I have lived as they
in their inmost rites—
they endure the tense nerves
through the moment of ritual.
I endure from moment to moment—
days pass all alike,
tortured, intense.This I forgot last night:
you must not be blamed,
it is not your fault;
as a child, a flower—any flower
tore my breast—
meadow-chicory, a common grass-tip,
a leaf shadow, a flower tint
unexpected on a winter-branch.I reason:
another life holds what this lacks,
a sea, unmoving, quiet—
not forcing our strength
to rise to it, beat on beat—
a stretch of sand,
no garden beyond, strangling
with its myrrh-lilies—
a hill, not set with black violets
but stones, stones, bare rocks,
dwarf-trees, twisted, no beauty
to distract—to crowd
madness upon madness.Only a still place
and perhaps some out horror
some hideousness to stamp beauty,
a mark—no changing it now—
on our hearts.I send no string of pearls,
no bracelet—accept this.Upon finishing this complex poem we re-enter its construction through the parallelism of its opening and closing couplets:
Instead of pearls—a wrought clasp—
a bracelet—will you accept this?
…
I send no string of pearls,
no bracelet—accept this.First, a question, an offering. Later an imperative, perhaps an insistence. A gift is offered and given with either hope or resignation, with confidence or desperation—it is difficult to gauge, precisely, the modality of the tonal shift between the poem’s first gesture and its last. But at least we can say: the poem is a gift. It is offered as it begins; it is given as it ends. It is offered instead of pearls, instead of a necklace or bracelet, though perhaps it replaces or stands in for the scattered seed-pearls, spilt on a street on a hot day. In a typical modernist trope, the work of art is juxtaposed against the commodity. It has another sort of value. We can say: one sort of value is substituted for another, and the poem performs this substitution. The poem is a substitution. And simply in being so, it implies a practice of comparison: this instead of that. The peculiar use value of art, over and against the determinate exchange values of the market. “I will not reason and compare; my business is to create.”
The poem begins by substituting itself for pearls, but insofar as it begins it is first of all a substitute for silence. It makes this clear in the second stanza:
You know the script—
you will start, wonder:
what is left, what phrase
after last night? This:A dearth of language following a quarrel? Or the insufficiency of phrases relative to the tangible pleasures of bodies? Again, the scenario is ambiguous, but where language ends the poem begins. The poem is a supplement. Its speech emerges from speechlessness.
The poem narrates, recalls, characterizes. It describes, through indirections, a you for whom “the world is yet unspoiled” and an I who wants not to be perceived as neurotic and embittered, as “defrauded of delight.”
Life is a scavenger’s pit—I escape—
I only, rejecting it,
lying here on this couchIf the world is spoiled, and the speaker knows it, her delight nevertheless remains in tact. Insofar as she rejects the world her delight is not defrauded. Her anxiety, however, seems to reside in the tenuousness of this escape and in the tension of the displacement between the world she rejects and the remainders of her relation to it. The description of that world, for example—poetic language, which ineliminably draws one out of silence into speech. The poem is a sacrifice. It sacrifices the repose of silence to speech, or even communication between an “I” and a “you;” it surrenders the private retreat of “I only” to the act of describing the world that one rejects.
The world is spoiled by a cloying modality of beauty that the speaker rejects, yet which the the poem is nevertheless compelled to describe:
Your garden sloped to the beach,
myrtle overran the paths,
honey and amber flecked each leaf,
the citron-lily head—
one among many—
weighed there, over-sweet.
…
The house, too, was like this,
over painted, over lovely—
the world is like this.The garden is a synechdoche for a world which is over-sweet, over-lovely, and this is a figure that runs throughout Sea Garden. We find its most stark presentation in “Sheltered Garden,” where this “beauty without strength / chokes out life,” and where its over-ripe sweetness gives way to a stringent, abrasive modality of beauty the speaker finds herself compelled to prefer.
O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.In “The Gift,” however, the stark contrast between the “wind-tortured place” of some terrible new beauty and the “beauty without strength” of the sheltered garden is complicated by the introduction of a third term: “a still place” neither enervated by stultifying prettiness nor dominated by the agitation of a tortuous wind. “I reason,” the speaker states, violating Blake’s criterion of poetic creation:
another life holds what this lacks
a sea, unmoving, quiet—
not forcing our strength
to rise to it, beat upon beat—
a stretch of sand,
no garden beyond, strangling
with its myrrh-lilies—
a hill, not set with black violets
but stones, stones, bare rocks,
dwarf-trees, twisted, no beauty
to distract—to crowd madness upon madness.Only a still place
and perhaps some outer horror
some hideousness to stamp beauty,
a mark—no changing it now—
on our hearts.These stanzas present a distilled summation of the affective, libidinal, or aesthetic cartography of Sea Garden, though the map has been redrawn to make space for a new topos. The “still place” evoked here does not force our strength to to rise to it, beat upon beat, like the sea of “The Helmsman.” Rather, it is “a sea, unmoving, quiet.” Beyond it there is no garden whose beauty “chokes out life,” nor are their black violets for whose multiplicity we would never trade “one root of the white sort.” Rather, there are “stones, stones, bare rocks / dwarf-trees, twisted, no beauty / to distract.” In this poem, then, it is not so much the replacement of one modality of beauty (cloying, sweet, pretty) by another (harsh, astringent, stark) that is at issue. Rather, there is “no beauty / to distract…only a still place,” and the eventual, complex emergence of beauty in the second stanza is not the property of an exterior scene but a relational quality. The “terrible / wind-tortured place” of “Sheltered Garden” is described here as “some outer horror, some hideousness”—stones, bare rocks, dwarf trees—and its function is to “stamp beauty…on our hearts.” The still place, then, is not of itself beautiful. Nor is a new beauty to be sought for directly among the wind-swept rocks. Rather, beauty is marked by the retroactive relation of their exteriority to the still place, and the impression of this mark is inevitable—not sought for, but rather accepted as an inescapable fact of affective life. A structure, one might say. Beauty can neither be objectified in a scene nor subjectively evaded: it is an impression, in a technical sense—a stamp or mark or trace that is the remainder of a relation.
The still place evoked in this poem is implicitly associated with “the initiates” introduced in the preceding stanzas:
Sleepless nights,
I remember the initiates,
their gesture, their calm glance.
I have heard how in rapt thought,
in vision, they speak
with another race,
more beautiful, more intense than this.
I could laugh—
more beautiful, more intense?
Perhaps that other life
is contrast always to this.
I reason:
I have lived as they
in their inmost rites—
they endure the tense nerves
through the moment of ritual.
I endure from moment to moment—
days pass all alike,
tortured, intense.Here the practice of comparison in which Sea Garden is engaged attains its most abstract and reflexive atunement. “Another race, / more beautiful, more intense”; “perhaps that other life is contrast always to this”; “I could laugh—more beautiful, more intense?” The superior beauty and intensity of another race is first registered as Utopian, and the Utopia of “that other life” is then drawn into contrast with “this” (which is also the final word of the poem). The tension of initiatic rites, carried through the moment of ritual, is identified through contrast with the neurotic intensity of the speaker who endures the tortured passage of days.
Poetry resides in neither ritual nor neurosis, neither the smooth gesture of the initiates nor the trembling hands of the hysteric, neither the calm glance nor distracted gaze. Poetry is the practice of comparison whereby the intensities of this world are drawn into contrast with those of Utopia and the scission produced by their relation is marked as writing. In “The Gift,” lyric recognizes its vocation so precisely that its speaker could laugh, but instead she queries the curious simplicity of the practice she has stumbled upon in the act of speaking: “more beautiful, more intense?”
Returning to the final lines of the poem—
I send no string of pearls,
no bracelet—accept this.—we might also hear: except this. In that case we could say: the poem is an exception. It stumbles upon its own singularity in the process of its articulation, even as it marks that singularity through its difference from what it is not (a string of pearls, for example). It is a relative singularity, and if this is not paradoxical it is because poetry is a practice of comparison, one that attains its singular intensities through the relations that it constructs and measures.
I only want to say, then, that lyric practice draws out into form and measure that which is most formless, most unmeasured, yet most immediately determinate in every aspect of our lives. We gravitate. We incline. We prefer. We decide. But the minutia of these affective processes and determinations—their stamp upon the heart—is so diffuse and pervasive as to be almost unintelligible, nearly insensible. Preference is so proximate to being that it merely is, and is therefore nearly unsayable.
In any practical political engagement, for example, we find ourselves immersed in a field of differential forces that opens up within a given sequence. We do not find that these are “left or “right,” but rather than they are reformist, reactionary, or radical, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, socialist, communist, anarchist, or…whatever. To take a position within such a field is to find ourselves within the current of our inclinations, and to measure their relation to contrasting forces they test themselves against. Within the alignment of these positions—the historical movement of their alignment—we feel our way toward our limits, toward our desire, toward the still place of Utopia and the catastrophe of its occlusion—the present state of things. What we call “the correct line” is that vector along which the mark of the limit is pushed furthest from where it began. But this practice of politics—a practice (like that of erotic life) whereby a field of relative intensities and our disposition toward them is measured, our inclinations are enacted, our preferences are made manifest, our limits are discovered—this practice is not written as such. Poetry distills, and what it distills are the reifications it has dissolved into relations. The dialectic of its formal making is to take that which has been named or measured, to reopen its qualitative composition, and then to take the measure of the relations that are released.
What H.D. shows us is that creation is not opposed to reason and comparison—or if it is, that this opposition is true friendship. This apparent opposition is, dialectically, the contradiction of which poiesis is made. The poem is a contradiction. A gift. A substitution. A supplement. A sacrifice. An exception. A contradiction. And at every moment of its unfolding through these modalities of relation, poetry is a practice of comparison.
