Starting with a critique of the rhetoric of rupture that is ordinarily closely linked to avant-garde aesthetics, this dissertation seeks to probe the ground of modernist American poetry through a poetics of and as relation. Viewing modernism and postmodernism from this standpoint has dramatic consequences on the assumptions of language theory and innovative poetry. Steering away from a single or dual literary portrait, this study follows the winding path relating early modernism to its metamorphic—or metamodernist—version. Largely focused on the late works of H.D. and Robert Duncan, my objective is not to establish the personal or literary boundaries of another counter-canon. Rather, the Duncan-H.D. line provides a critical outlook on the stakes of nodal or network writing. This involves a shift from the individual’s politics of invention [Pound, Eliot…] to an ethics of relational composition [Duncan, H.D.…]. Therefore, the emphasi! s is laid on published and unpublished poetic exchanges and epistolary relations also involving Levertov, Olson, Pound, and Creeley among others, gradually producing the multilinear mapping of a nomadic poetry. Duncan and H.D.’s relational poetics, as evidenced by The H.D. Book and Ground Work, or Hymen and the War Trilogy, draw on a “boundless creational field,” which is predicated on the Jamesian “lines of influence” and the Deleuzian “lines of flight,” ultimately underwriting Glissant’s philosophy of relation and Meschonnic’s groundbreaking language theory. H.D.’s Sapphic rewriting of classic symbols into complex images, like Duncan’s field poetics and serial writings, provide the ground for a reworking of twentieth-century modernism.
