"We Real Cool," illustrates the wealth of implication that the poet can achieve in a very spare poem: . . .

["Gay Chaps at the Bar" is] A sonnet series in off-rhyme, because I felt it was an off-rhyme situation--I did think of that.  I first wrote the one sonnet, without thinking extensions.  I wrote it because of a letter I got from a soldier who included that phrase in what he was telling me; and then I said, there are other things to say about what's going on at the front and all, and I'll write more poems, some of them based on the stuff of letters that I was getting from several soldiers, and I felt it would be good to have them all in the same form, because it would serve

... modern marriage was ideally characterized by companionship, but husbands and wives are far apart in their interests and personalities. In the transformation of the postwar period, the marriage relationship became both more important and more burdened. Often living far from grandparents and other extended family, members of the modern nuclear family had little support or guidance; they had only each other. The social scientists thus portrayed a family under stress....

I hope to demonstrate that H.D.’s Imagism undermines masculinist theories of impersonality by way of the metaphoric landscape/bodies and language for transgressive desire she gleaned from the sexually diverse "Greece" of Victorian Hellenists such as [Walter] Pater, [Oscar] Wilde, and [A. C.] Swinburne.

Though H.D. was not consistent in her commitment to the Greek persona, sometimes relinquishing it in favor of others and at no time limiting it absolutely to a certain set of qualities, we can, with reasonable accuracy, pinpoint the aspects of the Greek persona which typically appealed to H.D.

Permeating H.D.’s early revisionary exploration of female identity is an austere sensuality, an erotic dimension of repressed yet explosive sexuality that is nonreferential in nature. Like the potent flowers in Lawrence’s early novels and Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings, H.D.’s flowers indirectly suggest an intense eroticism, whose power comes precisely from its elusive, nonhuman expression. Related to her animistic sense of the scared, H.D.’s objective correlatives for the self often radiate erotic energy and rhythms. In particular, the five flower poems of Sea Garden . . .

"The minimal unit of poetic language is at least double, not in the sense of the signifier/signified dyad, but rather, in terms of one and another." This, from Julia Kristeva [Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art], confronts us with the I/you relationship, resonant for H.D.’s work throughout, but peculiarly isolated in her intense, ritualistic early poems. Where to "put" erotic energy, how to negotiate "one and another" changes during the early works.

The two parts of another poem—appropriately given the simple title "Garden"—makes it clear that for H.D., Imagism itself is, in every sense, a matter of identity; this small poem, paradigmatically Imagist and, like "Oread," an anthology piece, makes its claims for possible identity precisely in the terms of Imagism, literalizing the sculptural and poems-like-granite metaphors of Hulme and Pound. This poem's first part reverses the unstable imagery of "Sea Rose," turning the rose into that ultimate Imagist form, rock:

You are clear

O rose, cut in rock,

The Southern Cross is a complex gesture to the past bracketed by two complementary long poems, "Homage to Paul Cézanne," a hypnotic, highly figurative litany for the unnamed dead, and the title piece. . . .

Dickinson's poetic accomplishment was recognized from the moment her first volume appeared in 1890, but never has she enjoyed more acclaim than she does today. Once Thomas H. Johnson made her complete body of 1,775 poems available in his 1955 variorum edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, interest from all quarters soared. Readers immediately discovered a poet of immense depth and stylistic complexity whose work eludes categorization.