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Do love and poetry go together even better than love and marriage? In this book three couples begin as lovers and fellow poets, but only one couple marries. The others have diverse fates, but all
develop mentor-apprentice relationships, at least one to the detriment of the apprentice. The pairs are: H.D. and Ezra Pound, Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis, and Louise Bogan and Theodore Roethke. Using an unusual mix of Jungian and feminist psychoanalytic theory, the author tries to account for the effects the mentors had on their apprentices.
In brief, Thomas Simmons's thesis is that
a healthy mentor-apprentice relationship is fundamentally erotic, even if it is non-sexual. Two new people are created through a confluence of intimate perspectives, talent and experiences; and the kind of devotion one finds even in a non-sexual mentor-apprentice relationship suggests the erotic force behind this mode of self-creation. At the same time it seems equally important to recognize the dangers that lie within the life of the mentor-dangers that, in a sense, seduce the mentor because they reassure him that his relation to a larger tradition is secure, even if this relation jeopardizes his own humanity. (pp. 17-18)
After a disclaimer in which Simmons says that he is not really advocating professor-student sexual relationships, he struggles with the temptations of the male mentor of the female apprentice. To begin with, Simmons depicts Pound as H.D.'s mentor and seems to come to the conclusion that Pound was always the greater poet and that only his “will to master” destroyed his relationship to her and ultimately his own life as well. While Pound accuses her of “fickleness and faltering,” Simmons finds him unjust. According to Simmons, H.D. escapes from Pound's influence very late, in 1959. Simmons concludes that H.D. escaped the patriarchical influence of Pound only by switching from poetry to prose; Simmons sees prose as her own authentic voice.
He never mentions her epic poetry, her am