Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the nexus of poetry, espionage, and American power
University of Chicago Press, US$32.50 hb, 386 pp
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H.D.’s chief confidant
In his brief Foreword to H.D.’s posthumous collection, Hermetic Definition (1974), Yale Professor Norman Holmes Pearson (1909-75) provides an authoritatively crystalline summary of the poet’s life’s work. Asserting the primacy of her later poetry, the ‘war trilogy’ (1942-44) and Helen in Egypt (1961), Pearson recovers H.D. from her accepted but ‘inadequate’ typecasting as an Imagist, identifying her deployment of Freud as ‘a great mythologist’ in her highly personal engagement with hermetic and kabbalistic sources.
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Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the nexus of poetry, espionage, and American power
by Greg Barnhisel
University of Chicago Press, US$32.50 hb, 386 pp
ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.
