Today’s Poem: The Pool

Steven Knepper writes on the myth-haunted modernist, H.D.

Narcissus, by a follower of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, circa 1500 (Wikimedia Commons)

Steven Knepper holds the Bruce C. Gottwald, Jr. ’81 Chair for Academic Excellence at the Virginia Military Institute, where he teaches in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies. He is the author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond and co-author of a forthcoming critical introduction to the philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han. Like us at Poems Ancient and Modern, Steve has an abiding interest in the Moderns, those experimentalists at the start of the last century whose artistic revolutions have now become tradition. We nurse a particular affection for the  myth-haunted strangeness of Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), who signed her poems “H.D.” — and so we leapt at Steve’s suggestion that he write about her gnomic, existentially anxious early poem, “The Pool.”