Abstract

Literary critics have rarely paired Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and William Carlos Williams, despite their common involvement in the imagist movement and, subsequently, their long friendship. This neglect is partly due to the poets’ own idiosyncrasies. The contrast between H.D.'s intensely subjective, mythological poetics and Williams' apparently objective focus on every-day objects tends to locate the two poets in very different critical spheres and poetic traditions. In essays written and published in 1919, however, not too long after imagism’s flourishing, both writers attempted to theorize poetry in explicitly epistemological terms. This thesis examines that neglected confluence, showing how shared philosophical questions motivate the poets’ critical writings and poetic practice. In her 1919 essay 'Notes on Thought and Vision', H.D. proposes an epistemological theory wherein a heightened mode of vision offers knowledge of ideals immanent to material reality. In 'Notes From a Talk on Poetry', Williams advocates continual epistemological renewal through the ‘fastening’ of affect to the 'world of the senses', the visual sense in particular. This study reveals the centrality of affect — the mechanism by which vision becomes knowledge — to H.D.’s and Williams’ poetic theory. The thesis then analyses H.D.'s 1916 collection Sea Garden and Williams' 1921 collection Sour Grapes within the framework of these epistemological theories. Contrary to prevailing critical orthodoxies, which tend to emphasize H.D.’s hermeticism or Williams’ ontology, this thesis shows that the early poetry of both poets is best understood as a working through of the relations between vision, affect, and knowledge. Finally, the thesis argues that Sea Garden and Sour Grapes go beyond the essays of 1919, as the genre of poetry allows H.D. and Williams to engage with fundamental epistemological problems in more complex, problematic, and productive ways