Dream of a Past

In an essay on H.D.—supposedly the “perfect Imagist poet”––her daughter, Perdita Schaffner, wonders what H.D. does when she’s not writing: “Was she dreaming, was she in a sense writing?” H.D. answers her: “Evolving. Searching. My past, the past, the past that never was, and making something real of it.” So, Schaffner concludes, “both; and a correlation of the two.” To dream of the past, to create it anew—a writing and rewriting of yourself: this is the objective of HERmione, finished in 1927 but not published until 1981, twenty years after H.D.’s death.