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Connecting Dots and Dashes:
Working Towards an Understanding of Notes on Thought and Vision
“July, Scilly Islands” reads the inscription on the manuscript for Notes on
Thought and Vision. As Albert Gelpi has noted, this is the sole place marker of H.D.’s
extended meditation1. However, as in Gelpi’s short essay, H.D.’s life has often been
allowed by critics to eclipse her aesthetic and especially her theoretical work—
either partially or, in some cases, totally. My aim in this short essay is to take steps
towards reversing this understandable response to the poet’s often confessional or
journalistic style, however tempting it may be to do otherwise.2 Indeed, there is
much in Notes that can be tied to her personal experiences; but this moon has its
own merits—however the shadows fall upon her surface we must be the ones to
illuminate her. In this essay plan to address the largely feminist appropriation of
H.D.’s ideas before explicating the core theoretical concepts in Notes—namely her
account of human consciousness, “thought,” “vision” and art—in the hopes that from
I am referring specifically to “The Thistle and the Serpent,” Albert Gelpi’s
introduction to the text (Notes on Thought and Vision 7-14). All subsequent
references to Notes on Thought and Vision are to this edition and will be abbreviated
“NTV.”
I use the word “meditation” here to raise to the surface the Cartesian connotations it
carries, which I will explain later.
2 It may be worthy to mention for the reader unfamiliar with H.D.’s writings that
many of them she did not take steps toward publishing at any point during her life,
including Notes on Thought and Vision. Or, as Susan Stanford Friedman has noted,
“[H.D.] actually wrote far more prose, including critical essays, than was actually
published,” [emphasis mine] asking “Was her prose censored by the men, like
Pound, who nonetheless supported her poetry?” and, more relevant for this text in
particular, “Did she engage in self-censorship, suppressing what might not please?”
(Friedman 8).
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here on she might be taken not only as a serious writer, but a serious thinker.3 This
is not to say that there has not been very good critical work done on H.D.—there
has, and it is still being done today—only that it tends to be reductive towards her
writing in favor of a feminist or psychoanalytic lens while neglecting the aesthetic
theory that she’s developing in this work.
The Feminist Appropriation: A Reallocation of Friedman’s “Gynopoetics”
There is very little critical work that has been done with a strict focus on
Notes on Thought and Vision and the work that is circulating and taken seriously is
conducted almost entirely under a feminist agenda. In Penelope’s Web, Susan
Stanford Friedman changed the discourse in approaching H.D.’s poetry by
developing a theory of gynopoetics, claiming that Notes is the first piece by H.D. to
launch “into a full-blown Eleusinian gynopoetic,” to which “women implicitly have
privileged access (Friedman 9, 18). It seems doubtful that this kind of gynopoetics is
H.D.’s primary goal, as Friedman seems to understand it. In the section that
Friedman is analyzing, H.D. is developing a theory of consciousness, one that she can
only empirically confirm as female. So, if we take H.D. at her word, then when she
poses the question, “May this consciousness be centered entirely in the brain or
entirely in the womb or corresponding love-region of a man’s body?” she is
concerned with the location of that consciousness in her own body; she clearly
I direct this comment only at those who have the temerity to dismiss Notes
entirely, claiming that they “read alarmingly like D. H. Lawrence at his philosophical
worst” (Guest 120).
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recognizes though that there exists a “corresponding love-region” for males (NTV
20). As Helen Sword has observed, H.D. makes a “consistent effort to avoid a rigidly
dualistic cosmological schema, the kind of system that almost invariably comes to
include ‘male’ and ‘female’ among its primary oppositional pairings” (Sword 136).
From the first line of Notes, H.D. undermines such dualisms by delineating three
forms of consciousness, “body, mind, over-mind,” which she describes as
“manifestations of life” or being (NTV 17).
This in turn leads to a destabilization of the dominant gendered dualisms in
which body-irrational-feminine are associated and embodied in females while
mind-rational-masculine are conjoined and instantiated in males. By placing men
and women on an equal playing field, H.D. makes possible, and equally important,
bodily and intellectual feelings and thoughts for both men and women. As she states,
“All reasoning, normal, sane and balanced men and women need and seek…certain
definite physical relationships” (NTV 17). However, as Sword rightly acknowledges,
H.D. “does not, to be sure, avoid heterosexual metaphors entirely” [emphasis mine]
(Sword 138). Indeed, to say otherwise (as Friedman has done) would be to ignore
the numerous times that H.D. assumes a normative gender schema, aligning the
traditional gendered roles with the corresponding sex throughout Notes.
Take her description of Lo-fu who “furrow[s] the continent” of the natural
object from which he creates his art—the tree branch—which becomes “his
mistress now, his love” that he “possessed…with his great and famished soul” and
finally used “as the means of approach to something else”—that being “himself”—
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instead of as an end in itself (NTV 44-45).4 While many later on would seek to
undermine the dualism itself, H.D. maintains it throughout her text, acknowledging
the body and the mind as separate and distinct parts of the self, however equal in
value they might be. In fact, as Sword points out, “she explicitly (hetero)sexualizes
this process of mind-body harmonization” in some cases (Sword 138).5 When
Friedman claims that Notes “not only defines a modernist gynopoetic[, but] also
performs it” she reduces a complex theoretical work into a piece of early feminism
(Friedman 11). This is to ignore the full complexity of H.D.’s thoughts in this work,
which, as Friedman herself has noted, “reappeared in different form” in later work
done by the poet (Friedman 12). My critique of Friedman’s analysis however, is not
to diminish her overall focus; it is not to say that the female love-region’s dominant
image, “the womb,” is unimportant, but rather to shift the focus from a strictly
feminist perspective to a humanist one, which aligns itself with H.D.’s fixation in
Notes.
In fact, “the womb” is not only relevant, but crucial to understanding the kind
of aesthetic consciousness that H.D. is laying out in Notes. In shifting towards a new
kind of understanding of consciousness filtered through the female perspective, H.D.
makes that perspective fundamental and definitive to her aesthetic or poetic theory
I will not go through the trouble of addressing a more startling issue here: H.D.’s
transformation of the historically female poet, Lo-fu, into a male poet, (though this
could certainly be a case of mistaken information or mis-citation as H.D. was prone
to particularly in her unpublished writings. See Robert Spoo’s Introduction to
Asphodel.)
5 I take this merely to be a constriction of her time, as it is commonly taken that
attention to gendered language in particular was not taken up until 1949 with the
publication of Le Deuxième Sexe by Simone de Beauvoir. As Sandra Lee Bartky might
argue, H.D.’s “feminist consciousness” had not yet been raised, at least in regard to
language. See Bartky, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness.”
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for all people—a “gynopoetic,” in a sense. H.D. uses the image of the womb to
express the circular or cyclical nature and what I will call the aspect of double-birth
in the over-conscious mind while also using this last point as an argument against
inspiration, which I see as directed primarily at Plato.6 Gary Burnett has interpreted
only one half of this birth in a discussion of the “innate daemon” of Asphodel, which
he characterizes as “possession by a daemon of one’s own” and yet this reduces the
double-birth integral to H.D.’s analysis (Burnett 29).
One who has achieved the over-conscious mind is, as Friedman has rightly
identified, “the poet-as-fetus” as “both contained and container, both inside and
outside, child of the mother and mother to the poem, her child,” thus something
both born and birthing (Friedman 10). Burnett has conflated the product of the
individual with its progenitor, describing this “possession” as “subsum[ing] its
antecedents,” while I will show that they are in fact distinct.7 H.D.’s use of this very
particular kind of gynopoetic, one that has not been correctly identified in the past,
is fundamental to teasing out the intricacies of H.D.’s account of consciousness and
her description of “thought” and “vision” in relation to the womb imagery she uses
throughout Notes.
I will return to this notion of the circular nature of the over-conscious mind in
“Psychoanalysis and the Circularity of Consciousness,” though I will more fully
address the birthing aspect in a moment. However, I should say that, for the sake of
space, a full analysis of this latter aspect will be foregone, though it is, of course,
worth doing. The scope of this paper simply does not allow for it. However, I might
suggest looking in Ion, to begin and also at Phaedo 69d to address H.D.’s seemingly
peculiar comment that “Socrates said ‘There are many wand-bearers but few
inspired’” (NTV 31).
7 I will return to prove this in”’Thought,’ ‘Vision,’ and Art.”
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The Enabling of Consciousness
To accurately render the titular concepts, one must first take stock of H.D.’s
broader view of consciousness, which I have touched on earlier, but mandates more
attention here. Before I begin, I will mention, as Sword has noted, that “[H.D.] shifts
the meanings of her terms and definitions practically from one paragraph to the
next” (Sword 136). Recognizing that not all will be familiar with her manifold use of
terminology, let it suffice for me to use “the sub-conscious mind” to represent: body
consciousness, the love-brain, the love-mind, the womb, the oyster, the body, the
love-region and the sub-consciousness; “the conscious mind” for: mindconsciousness, normal consciousness, scientific, the over-brain, the over-mind,8 the
intellect, the brain and the thistle; and lastly “the over-conscious mind” for: overmind, over-world consciousness, the over-conscious, over-mind consciousness, the
serpent, the jelly-fish and the pearl.9 I will now take on each form of consciousness
in ascending order, from the sub-conscious mind up to the over-conscious mind
while addressing the core aspects of each as succinctly as possible in order to leave
space enough for “thought” and “vision”.
In order to attain the third and highest level of consciousness, one must first
pass through two stages of “initiation”—“the mere animal stage,” (or the subconscious mind), reached through a subjective and physical appreciation of one’s
Cited here to account for a particularly slippery usage of this term that I take to
mean the same as “over-brain” on page 23.
9 I have ultimately settled on these three, “the sub-conscious mind,” “the conscious
mind” and “the over-conscious mind” as they were H.D.’s own final account when
she “[thought] at last [that] I have my terms clear” (NTV 49).
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own body and the bodies of others “and the intellectual stage,” (or the conscious
mind), which can only be reached by oneself, objectively or “scientifically” as H.D.
says (NTV 30-31). H.D. uses the Eleusinian mysteries as an example of a kind of
institutionalized enactment of this process in which the participants “would be
interested because it was the thing to be interested—and also to show their
superiority” implicitly endorsing a similar method for her contemporaries (NTV
30).10 H.D. explains that “one must understand a lower wisdom before one
understands a higher” and thus must pass through both the sub-conscious and
conscious states of mind prior to achieving the over-conscious state, the highest of
the three (NTV 49).
Towards the end of Notes she claims that the sub-conscious mind or “the
body, with all its emotions and fears and pain in time casts off the spirit, a
concentrated essence, not itself, but made in a sense, created by itself” (NTV 51).
Here one can derive an intriguing comparison to Descartes whose rationalistic
philosophy and mind-body dualism has influenced all of Western thought after him.
H.D. is, at times, speaking from a kind of rationalistic perspective as Descartes does,
which can be clearly seen, for instance, in her finally defining all three states of life
as forms of mind, where through the mind or the rational, one is able to “link” them
all (NTV 49). However, she moves away from Descartes’ extreme mind-body
dualism significantly in her stress on the importance of the body itself, even
bestowing on it a kind of intellect of its own.
It may be helpful here to see a similarity in Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of “der
Wille zur Macht,” in which human beings strive for the best that they can achieve
qua human being.
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H.D. takes Descartes’ notion and places it within the bounds of her own
experience in which her body and mind are both phenomenologically omnipresent,
while her consciousness of either (or of consciousness itself) may fluctuate. She
characterizes her emphasis on physicality through the Eleusinian mysteries and
their initial stage, translating to the “pornographic literature” of our own day (NTV
30). An appreciation of such signifies “a normal healthy body,” without which one
“may [not] be ready for the second stage of initiation” (NTV 30-31). Though,
ultimately, the latter two stages take up the limelight in a way that the bodily stage
does not, “the intellect and the soul…[must] be anchored in the material life and
desire of the body” and thus it is no less relevant to the process and, in fact becomes
a focus later on in Notes when H.D. refers to the circular nature of consciousness
(Friedman 9).11 But I will return to that later.
H.D. gives a twofold account of the conscious mind as a stage of initiation
towards “vision”. First dividing its stimulation into its “excite[ment] by this
interchange of ideas” between “two lovers” who “interact in sympathy of thought”
or “by the [physical] appearance or beauty of the loved one (NTV 22).12 This, as she
Surely there is a deeper metaphysical ontology of the human being at work here,
but as the scope of this paper does not allow for it, let it suffice to say that if one’s
desires are rooted in the body and what have been taken to be purely rational
ideals, such as truth, beauty, goodness, etc., can be desired, for H.D. that is grounded
somewhere in our physical and more specifically bodily desires. Her centralized
focus on sexuality in particular works on a number of things, one of which is
accounting for the female form that often characterizes what is pursued in the
masculine tradition of literature, e.g. Σοφíα (Sophia) or Ἀθηνᾶ (Athena). Even
Socrates’ Διοτίμα (Diotima) could be construed as an example of this.
12 An interesting study that exceeds the scope of this paper could be done of H.D.’s
use of “love” and “lovers” in this book. As Sword has noted “H.D. gives no indication
that such lovers must be heterosexual” pointing out that “in fact her examples of two
scientists or two soldiers loving each other suggest, if anything, a male homosexual
11
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says, can kindle the conscious mind and it either “becomes…a jelly-fish, placed over
and about the brain” or “becomes this womb-brain or love-brain that I have
visualized as a jelly-fish in the body,” which in turn becomes “capable of thought”
(NTV 22). Her image of the “jelly-fish” is peculiar, but central to connecting these
two manifestations of intellect through a set of “long feelers” that “[stand] in the
same relation to the nervous system as the over-mind to the brain or intellect” (NTV
19). The over-conscious mind, already figured as a “jelly-fish,” encompasses and
conjoins both “the brain and the womb” as “centres of consciousness” into one state
of being that can be attained by any living person and has manifested itself in
different persons and different ways throughout time (NTV 19, 21).13
The concept is a difficult one and H.D. recognized that. She invariably
describes it in terms of metaphor, at first as “a cap of consciousness over my head”;
then “like a closed sea-plant, jelly-fish or anemone”; as “an opera-glass” with “love-
paradigm” (Sword 137-138). I also see another sexual focus pertaining to a
rationalistic theory—namely that of Plato in Symposium where both Socrates and
Alcibiades present these view-points and are, in fact, said to be lovers.
13 There is not space enough to discuss it here, but her choice of particular
personages (such as Socrates, Lo-fu, Leonardo da Vinci, Meleager and The Galilean
or Jesus Christ) to exemplify the attainment of the over-conscious mind elucidates
much of her philosophical, aesthetic, ethical and theological theories. It also, more
subtly, suggests that elements of social construction and mere divergence of
language are what separates those persons who have achieved the over-conscious
mind. This is in line with her palimpsestic thought in that all those who have
achieved the highest state of being are said to express the same thing or are writing
on the same “palimpsest,” only differing in their particularity (NTV 29-30, 46, 4849). Or, as Eileen Gregory has noted, “the scientific precision, the eroticism, and the
mystical clairvoyance are one…the mystical and the scientific are always
inextricably bound together and contained within each other” (Gregory 81).
See Gregory for a psychoanalytic interpretation of this in relation to H.D.’s mother
and father.
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mind and the over-mind [as] two lenses,”14 though she generally sticks to the jellyfish image (NTV 18-19, 23, 40, 51).15 Part of what is at work in the jelly-fish
metaphor, is an attempt at physically localizing the over-conscious mind in either
the “head” or “the love-region of the body” (NTV 20).16 She is attempting an
empirical account of her own mind “capable of three states of being” and so too of
perceiving the world, both visually (of the objects therein) and theoretically through
the thoughts of her own mind (NTV 42).17
“Thought,” “Vision” and the Work of Art
It is this “thought” that is presented by the over-conscious mind and seen,
visually in a sense, by the conscious mind that makes possible the creation of works
of art. These “thoughts pass and are visible” in the watery cap of the over-conscious
mind and are then presumably instantiated in some way or another (NTV 19). H.D.
gives the example of the Madonna of the Rocks, saying “[it] is not a picture. It is a
window. We look through [this] window into the world of pure over-mind” (NTV
18). Both thought and vision are then necessary in the production of works of art,
Here I believe that “over-mind” is referring to its direct antecedent, “over-brain,”
which stands in for mind and not her common term “over-mind” as “over-mind
consciousness” (NTV 22-23).
15 This “jelly-fish in the body” bears a striking resemblance to a fetus, and, again,
though it exceeds the scope of this paper, it would be a fascinating study to examine
Plato’s notion in Theaetetus of Socrates as the midwife delivering thought babies, or,
H.D. might say, delivering “jelly-fish…over and about the brain” and how H.D.’s
physical use of the image here is a response to that (NTV 22).
16 An exercise that, we shall see, is of her faculty of “vision”.
17 To give a more psychoanalytical account, one might say she is describing and
arguing for “multiple psychic states within a single human being,” as Sword does
(Sword 135).
14
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which may act as “sign-posts” or “straight, clear entrances…to over-world
consciousness” (NTV 24). It is not enough, as H.D. points out, to only access the loveregion, as she accuses “most of the so-called artists of today” of doing (NTV 21).
More directly, she claims that “[The Delphic Charioteer] was no ‘inspiration,’ it was
sheer, hard brain work” (NTV 26). The problem for H.D. lies in our own ability to
perceive this: “There is no trouble about the art, it is the appreciators we want;”
persons who can “receive a definite message from [the work of art], like dots and
lines ticked off by one receiving station, received and translated into definite
thought by another telegraphic centre” (NTV 26).
It may already be clear then that, as Notes itself is “highly experimental in
form” as Friedman as pointed out, that it is “interrupted by lines that join what they
divide” and thus represents itself as an exercise in H.D.’s use of her own vision, a
work of art.18 This would explain both her empiricism and focus on the physical
body as well as her rationalistic notion that the over-conscious mind can only be
achieved through the intellect, through the mind. I have not discussed this latter
aspect sufficiently and yet is necessary to completing a rudimentary understanding
of H.D.’s almost after-thought of designating all of three forms of consciousness as
“mind” at the end of the text.
Psychoanalysis and the Circularity of Consciousness
I will also reprint Friedman’s note found in her text at this point, for the sake of
interest: “City Lights, which published Notes for the first time, inserted highly
suggestive ‘Os’ (perfect spheres/empty ciphers) for the two-inch line H.D. used
throughout the text to separate the brief sections” (Friedman 369, footnote 17). I
might add to this, although it was not H.D.’s intention, both of these markings are
themselves representations of “dots and dashes” (NTV 26).
18
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Eileen Gregory has made note that in the original typescript for Notes, there
was a marked out dialogue between the speaker and an interlocutor who accuses
her of “pretentiousness and arrogance, preciosity, obscurity, and banality” (Gregory
67). While this was taken out, a similar exchange occurs towards the end of the text,
first between the speaker and “a young man, a scholar and philosopher” and after
that with “a scientist, a psychologist” in which H.D. clarifies and re-clarifies her
terminology in an effort to reach universality (NTV 46, 48). In so doing she
recognizes the virtues and faults of both of her interlocutors and herself and even
seeks a higher or perhaps an independent standpoint from which she can produce
her theory. This seemingly impartial position as well as the factor of dialogue
situates the H.D. into the traditional role of the philosopher, signaling her approach
to this text, but also recommending our own.19
Her first interlocutor positions these states as conscious mind, sub-conscious
mind and universal mind, claiming that H.D.’s “over-mind is not good” since “the
mental state I describe lies below the sub-conscious mind” (NTV 46). This leads to a
reexamination of her own terminology, positioning her writing as subjective and
open—none of her terms are definitive or final, only the experience itself: “[The
philosopher] means by universal mind exactly what I mean by over-mind but
certainly my term over-mind is not adequate, if this over-mind state is approached by
others through the sub-conscious” (NTV 46 emphasis mine). H.D. recognizes the
It is worth noting though that, for H.D., it does not particularly matter if we are
philosophers, artists, mystics or any other person, so long as we have achieved the
over-conscious mind, and “have the right sort of brains” to receive her message
(NTV 26).
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virtues in both of their accounts, identifying them both as “visualize[d]…in a row,”
but immediately undermines that, supposing that “the universal symbol is the
triangle, or taken a step further, the circle, as the three seem to run into one another,
though neither he nor I visualize them that way” (NTV 46).
This off-handed comment though is crucial in understanding fully H.D.’s
attention to the body throughout this work. The circular understanding does not
simply make the body necessary for spirit, but “once a man becomes conscious of
this jelly-fish above his head…his chief concern automatically becomes his body”
(NTV 50). As one achieves the over-conscious mind, one will return to this lowest
level of consciousness with a newfound appreciation of the body, recognizing that it
is “like an oyster” through which one “makes the pearl” of spirit (NTV 51). Here now
sense can be gleaned from earlier comments like “the majority of dream…vision is
vision of the womb,” or vision of the sub-conscious mind (NTV 21). For the body is
now figured as that which immediately senses the world and, in so doing, forms the
spirit, “the kingdom of heaven, being a pearl of great price” (NTV 49).
Yet, her turn to this psychoanalytic term occurs as a direct response to her
second interlocutor, the psychologist. Again H.D. finds fault in both of their
definitions:
We were both wrong. I was about to cover too much of the field of
abnormal consciousness by the term over-mind. He, on the other hand,
would have called it all sub-conscious mind.
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But the sub-conscious and the over-conscious are entirely different
states, entirely different worlds. (NTV 49)
This interaction is telling, for in distinguishing the sub-conscious and the overconscious minds, she recognizes some of the validity of the psychoanalytic
viewpoint—that the sub-conscious can serve as a kind of gateway to the overconscious, but not without, as she says, “the intellect, the brain, the conscious mind”
acting as “the bridge across, the link between [them]” (NTV 49). This explains not
only her classification of all three states as “mind”—since it is by this alone that any
of the states may be known—but also her account of the body as being integral to
achieving the over-conscious mind.20
Concluding Remarks and a Suggestion for Application
By now it is my hope that it is clear that H.D. is articulating a distinctive
aesthetic theory that is intimately tied to her ontology of the human being, but more
This may also have some validity in relation to the concept of dreams in Notes,
though I admit it goes beyond the scope of this paper. As she writes:
20
The sub-conscious world is the world of sleeping dreams and the
world great lovers enter, physical lovers, but very great ones.
The over-conscious world is the world of waking dreams and the
world great lovers enter, spiritual lovers, but only the greatest. (NTV 49)
This may be elucidated by understanding the sub-conscious mind, or the world of
sleeping dreams, as revealing aspects of the over-conscious mind, or the world of
waking dreams by our cognitive restructuring and analysis of such dreams upon
waking—a process which, in fact, many undertake immediately upon waking, or, as
H.D. writes, “a sub-conscious dream may become an over-conscious dream at the
moment of waking” (NTV 49).
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work must be done. There are the multifarious issues I have raised and left
unaddressed in this paper, but moreover the issues I have left unaddressed, namely
an adequate interpretation of her use of myth, metaphorically, allegorically and
anagogically; an account of all of metaphors she uses, how they are used, why and
how they work together; a deeper understanding of the art object, particularly in
moments when she identifies living beings, such as humans, as such and so on.
While this may prove to be unhelpful in literary analysis, it may be taken up, and it is
my hope that it will be, by aestheticians as a way of expressing the nature of the
human being in terms of our artistic production and capability.21
The thoughts expressed in Notes and expounded on in this paper may also
prove useful in reexamining H.D.’s own poetry both before, but predominately after
the writing of Notes. With these aspects of her thought elucidated, even partially, the
results could be tremendous in unpacking the finer workings of poems like “Helios
and Athene,” Trilogy and others. In this sense, H.D.’s form of gynopoetic and its
proper application to her own poetry could be used as a model for its application to
other female writers throughout time. It is my hope that I myself might continue in
this work and that others would aid me in it, even without my knowledge.
Of course keeping in mind that H.D. herself recognized that this has been said
before” (NTV 51).
21
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Works Cited
Burnett, Gary. H.D. between Image and Epic: The Mysteries of Her Poetics. Ann
Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1990.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Forming a Critical Voice on Modernism.” Penelope's Web:
Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press,
1990. 7-18.
Gregory, Eileen. H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines. New York, NY: Cambridge
16
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University Press, 1997.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Asphodel. Ed. Spoo, Robert. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1992.
———. Notes on Thought and Vision & The Wise Sappho.
San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1982.
Sword, Helen. “H.D. and the Poetics of Possession.” Engendering Inspiration:
Visionary Strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D.. Ann Arbor, MI:
The University of Michigan Press, 1995. 119-172.
Works Consulted
Bartky, Sandra Lee. Tuana, Nancy and Tong, Rosemarie, eds. “Toward
a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness.” Feminism & Philosophy:
Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation, and Application. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1995. 396-406.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender
Difference in Literary Discourse.” Feminist Studies. 13.1 (1987): 49-82.
Fritz, Angela DiPace. Thought and Vision: A Critical Reading of H.D.'s Poetry.
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Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988.
Hollenberg, Donna Krolik. “’Serpent and Thistle’ The Emotional Charge Around
the Child.” H.D.: The Poetics of Childbirth and Creativity. Boston, MA:
Northeastern University Press, 1991. 17-30.
Kibble, Matthew. “Sublimation and the Over-mind in H.D.’s ‘Notes on Thought
and Vision.” English Literature in Translation, 1880-1920. 41.1 (1998):
42-57.
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