Dr. Richard Vytniorgu (University of Valencia, May 6, 2019). 12h, Room 203.

• Is there more to modernist poetry than the work of men?
• Why did the imagism of the pre-war era turn into the myth-making of the post-war?
• How do feminist poetics change the way we understand modernist translation?

In spite of the efforts of feminist scholarship since the 1970s, modernism, and modernist poetry in particular, is popularly characterised as an assertion of robust, hard-line masculinity and a rejection of ‘soft’ late-Victorian Romanticism. Women’s modernism has often been treated as marginal to the subject rather than of central importance. In response, this lecture will follow the career of one woman modernist poet in particular – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) – as she sought to respond to the masculinity of the male ‘image’ and turn translation into a feminist, myth-making aesthetic capable of changing the way we think and write about human experience. H.D.’s poetry will be explored alongside that of Pound and Eliot, in order to create a gendered understanding of how and why poets adopted innovative techniques in response to dramatic changes in lived experience.