This chapter claims that Pound’s reconfiguration of Sophocles’s Trachiniai as a Noh play works towards the realization of the dream of the long Imagist poem that coheres (first articulated in 1916), enabling Pound to return to the writing of the Cantos – much as H.D.’s translation of Ion in the 1930s had allowed her to return to writing and led to Trilogy. Pound’s Women of Trachis offers a condensed image not only of the play which it translates, but also of Pound’s own body of work up to that time. Yet the translation also undercuts the triumphant narrative it seems to present, an undercutting that the soon-to-be-composed late Cantos will seek to refute. Section: Rock-Drill and Thrones recruit first other tragedies to balance and further clarify the relation between poetics and politics that remain ambivalent in the Sophocles translations, and then pre- and post-Athenian Greek texts that, in Pound’s excerpting, seem to harness the Greek language towards a monosemic vision dictated by Pound’s politics. The Trachinian Herakles himself has to be further translated into other mythical figures in the Cantos in order for the promise he represents to be fulfilled.

This chapter examines H.D.’s and Pound’s early work with Greek lyric – in particular, the Greek Anthology and Sappho. It traces Pound’s skeptical, ambivalent, and often self-contradictory use of Greek in the 1910s as he tries to articulate his poetics of the image, tracking the differing prisms (Provençal lyric, Bengali poetics, Chinese ideograms, Primitivism, Vorticism) through which he interprets the value of Greek as his own artistic alliances shift between 1908 and 1918. It contrasts Pound’s varying approaches, whether outlined in his prose writings on prosody and the visual arts or actually followed in his early poems based on Greek lyric to H.D.’s already highly sophisticated and well-developed perspective, as seen in her translations also from the Greek Anthology and Sappho – translations which are the basis of some of her best-known poems. The author argues, moreover, that H.D.’s engagement with Greece even at this early stage is more deeply textual, self-conscious, and historically aware than has been recognized. Nonetheless, she show that despite striking differences in tone and some distinction in approach, Pound and H.D.’s poetics were subtly evolving in similar ways.

The Introduction outlines the intellectual and literary context of Modernist Hellenism, situating the book in relation to other scholarship in modernist and reception studies and classical receptions. It discusses the discourses both of modernism and of hellenism current in the first half of the twentieth century, and begins to sketch out the ways in which Pound and H.D.’s poetic and translational practice differs from those, expanding on each poet’s theories of poetic composition as translation.

This chapter examines H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961). While H.D. reviews her own life’s (Greek) work in her long poem in ways that recall Pound’s gathered currents in Women of Trachis, the challenge she sets herself is the opposite of that discernible in Pound’s late cantos: not coherence, but the embrace of proliferating images. The whole poem is an extended “hatching” of the Greek word eidolon ‘image, phantom, idol.’ The importance of the eidolon for H.D. has been previously recognized; the argument here differs in the specificity with which the author traces its lexical and conceptual translation throughout the poem. She reads the first part of Helen in Egypt both as a faithful and programmatic translation of Euripides’s Helen and as a revision of H.D.’s own previous writings on Helen. As with H.D.’s earlier translations, this one too catalyzes new writing: Helen in Egypt’s next two parts in subsequent years, where the Euripidean play’s import and relevance, as well as its unresolved tensions, are teased out. Helen in Egypt thus both performs and argues for the kind of approach to Greek here termed modernist hellenism: balancing freedom and constraint, “philology” and poetry.

Historically condemned for their commercial exploitation of poesy, and threat to authorial autonomy, the literary anthology was nevertheless one of the signal forms of literary modernism, in the US and beyond. It was at once a salient means for circulating and preserving verse and a genre in its own right. Although the little magazine has been the more attractive genre of study – both for the form’s closer proximity to collaborative literary production and for their amenability to digital scholarly methods – the anthology often had a symbiotic relationship to little magazines in the modernist period, and has endured as a form for aesthetic and political self-identification, speculative interpellation, preservation, and reclamation, as well as being a mode of reaching audiences beyond the “field of restricted production.” This chapter traces the US career of the anthology from Des Imagistes to An “Objectivists” Anthology, emphasizing the genre’s key importance for Black American writing.

Langston Hughes’s association with Chicago as a nexus for modernism was clearly marked in 1926, when he published four poems in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a leading journal for avant-garde poetry in the English-speaking world. This analysis considers how geocultural contexts in Chicago figured in the development of Hughes’s engagements with modernism. Examining Hughes’s jazz and blues poetry of the 1920s in light of his response to formal innovations by Chicago Renaissance poets such as Carl Sandburg as well as “high” modernists such as T. S. Eliot, I also explore how his critical engagement with Ezra Pound’s imagist poetics was shaped by the prior examples of Sandburg and Jean Toomer, and conclude with a discussion of how Hughes’s literary collaboration with Chicago luminaries such as Richard Wright and his mentorship of Gwendolyn Brooks played an important role in the creative flowering of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

Wright wrote and published poetry throughout his career, culminating in the remarkable collection of “projections in the haiku manner” which he composed in the last years of his life. This analysis contextualizes Wright’s late turn to haiku in relation to his larger body of work; his reading of scholarship on haiku and Japanese Buddhism; his involvement with the Partisan Review during the 1930s; his revisionary engagement with modernist poetry, including Ezra Pound’s haiku-inspired imagism as well as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; and his affirmation of Emersonian pragmatism. I conclude by exploring the transmission of Wright’s legacy to contemporary African American poets such as Sonia Sanchez, whose liberating experiments with haiku have resulted in new expressive possibilities.

Lola Ridge is an exemplary case of an overlooked Irish woman poet of major talent, whose life and career failed to follow a conventional path, and who is only now receiving her full critical due. Born in Dublin, Ridge lived in Australia and New Zealand before settling in the United States, where she was active in leftist politics. Previous critics of Ridge have seen her Irishness as accidental rather than essential, but this is to downplay the ways in which her Irishness interacts with transnational poetics in the modernist age. Her first book, The Ghetto, is a striking example of the urban modernist lyric, comparable to the work of Mina Loy and Muriel Rukeyser, while her broader links to Imagism and Objectivism are dynamic and, for an Irish poet of the time, remarkable. Sensitive portraits of working-class and immigrant-class life are a particular forte. Irish politics are also a felt presence, however, as in her third book Red Flag. Looking forward to Adrienne Rich as much as to Eavan Boland, Ridge is a poet very much of our time, and one who belongs at the centre of the modern Irish canon.