The “Problematics of Culture and Theory” Seminar, held by the School of English at Aristotle University,
is warmly inviting you to attend a talk by
Professor Dimitris Tryphonopoulos (Professor of English, University of Alberta, Canada)
on Thursday, 23rd October 2025, at 14.00 (14.00-15.15)
in Room 112, Old Philosophy Building
The title of the talk is:
“Metres, Memories formed and reformed”: H.D.’s Rejection of Ezra Pound’s Patriarchal Prosodies
All interested in attending the talk are kindly asked to compete the registration form.
EVENT ABSTRACT
The following narrative has entered the canon of modernist literary history: H.D. was influenced immensely by Pound who “baptized” her “H.D., Imagiste” and presented her to the literary world as the original and exemplary practitioner of Imagism--a “movement” he conceived as reviving what he took to be the essential Greek poetic idiom. In this act of naming and promotion, H.D. was both Hellenized and objectified, transformed by Pound into his “Sapphic fragment,” a precious artifact of his own poetic design and imagination. Yet a close reading of H.D.’s early verse, written under the influence of the Greek Anthology and inspired not only by Sappho but also by poets such as Anyte of Tegea, together with a consideration of prose work HERmione (completed in 1927), reveals a different trajectory. While she began within the confines of what appeared to be Pound’s Imagist program--producing concise, objective, epigrammatic, brief poems--H.D. would ultimately resist and transcend the patriarchal agenda of his prosody. She refused his directive to devote herself to the reproduction of Sapphic stanzas and conventional lyric formulas. Recasting herself as a poet of spiritual and mythic rather than of fragmentary objectivity, H.D. moved beyond Pound’s classical and masculinist prescriptions to develop a feminist poetics: an epic vision that unfastened the patriarchal underpinnings of Western verse and replaced them with a prosody of emancipation, revision, and reclamation.
GUEST SPEAKER SHORT BIO
Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos is professor of English at the University of Alberta, Augustana campus where, between 2019-2024, he served as Dean and Executive Officer. He has served as Secretary of the International Ezra Pound Society since 2000; and between 2000 and 2015, he served as Associate Editor of Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. His essays on Ezra Pound, H.D. and other Anglo-American (and Greek) modernist poets have appeared in North American and European journals and essay collections. Moreover, he is the author, editor, co-editor, or translator of seventeen volumes, including The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos; I Cease Not to Yowl: Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti; Majic Ring: An annotated edition of H.D. (writing as Delia Alton); The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia; Approaches to Teaching Pound’s Poetry and Prose; and Approaches to Teaching the Works of C. P. Cavafy. He continues to work on several new projects, including H.D.’s Later Poetry: Trilogy; Vale Ave; Helen in Troy; and Hermetic Definition: An Annotated Edition.
Problematics Seminar Coordinators
Dr L.E. Roupakia (roupakia@enl.auth.gr) and Dr Ε. Botonaki (botonaki@enl.auth.gr)
