You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this paper I will explore what the poet, novelist, and essayist H.D. called her “most luscious sort of vers libre relationship with Freud” in her letter to Kenneth Macpherson (April 1, 1933). Vers libre—the French term for unrhymed, unmetered verse, for the sound patterns ordered by the inner impulses of the poet's desire—a kind of verse for which H.D. was justly famous, a kind that was to alter radically the poetry of the twentieth century. Desire, disruptions of the conventional, improvisation—all were present in H.D.'s collaboration with Freud. It was a collaboration of two geniuses—one a creative woman, the other an intellectual patriarch—to sift through the shards of memory, dream, and vision to reconstruct the past of the poet. It was also what George Moraitis has called a “pact for the future,” for posterity, with each of the actors in the drama aware that their work together might well affect the shape of their legacy in history. And it was what H.D. more playfully punned to Bryher “a long and slimy process, this of un-UNKing the UNK or de-bunking the junk” (May 2, 1936).
More specifically, I am going to describe a project I am now completing entitled Portrait of an Analysis with Freud: The H.D.-Bryher Letters, 1933-1934. I cannot go into great detail, but I would like to describe the multiple issues