"Ruins, Fragments, and the Word: War, Memory, and Utopian Vision in H.D.’s Late Poetry"

The lecture examines H.D.’s Trilogy (1944–1946) as a poetic response to the devastation of the London Blitz, where ruins and fragments become the ground for a visionary reimagining of culture and survival. Written amid destruction, Trilogy does not retreat into nostalgia but forges continuity through acts of remembrance and re-vision. Drawing on mythological, religious, and cultural palimpsests, H.D. enacts an alchemy of language that both records trauma and insists on the regenerative power of words. By invoking feminine divinities, sacred rituals, and syncretic traditions, H.D. challenges the binary logic that structures war discourse – soldiers/civilians, men/women, victors/vanquished—and repositions the poet as a “worker in ideas” capable of transforming detritus into beauty. Her poetics aligns ruins with possibilities of renewal, suggesting that utopia is not deferred to an imagined future but emerges from the very fragments of the present. Trilogy thus offers a feminist poetics of survival that situates war as a cultural condition rather than an aberration, while simultaneously opening a space for healing, memory, and vision. Against destruction and erasure, H.D. sets the endurance of art, demonstrating how language itself can become an act of resistance and a site of utopian imagination.