‘“Sand is the beginning and the end of our dominion”: Mary Barnard, H.D. and Imagism,’ Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, 36 (Spring 2010): 47-74

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Barnsley, Sarah. 2010. ‘“Sand is the beginning and the end of our dominion”: Mary Barnard, H.D. and Imagism,’ Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, 36 (Spring 2010): 47-74. Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics,, 36, pp. 47-74. [Article]

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This article explores the relationship between Mary Barnard (1909-2001) and H.D. through an examination of the ways in which both poets use sand as a model for image and language in their early poetry, taking Barnard’s refrain, “sand is the beginning and the end of our dominion”, as a starting-point for critical comparison. I read H.D.’s Sea Garden alongside Barnard’s “late Imagist” poetry of the 1930s, drawing on unpublished materials recently made available by Barnard’s literary estate. Sand is found to mark “the beginning and the end” of various aesthetic and personal dominions: not only the “dominion” of the American northwestern landscape that Barnard was one of the first to articulate in American poetry, but also a “dominion” of female modernist poetry that Barnard and H.D. cultivated between them, partly in opposition to that which Pound envisioned for them. And yet, I conclude, their poetics of sand bind Barnard and H.D. irrevocably to Poundian Imagism, for they encode much of what Pound had attempted to say about the nature of the Image and an Imagist poetry of “fine particulars”, positioning Barnard as a significant “late Imagist” deserving of wider critical attention.

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