Michael Heller encyclopedia entry

HELLER, MICHAEL 213

manifestations of the divine. Helen awakens from “dream or trance” in part 1, moves “as one in a dream” in part 2, and proclaims in part 3: “I am awake. I see things clearly.” The poem follows Helen’s attempt to unravel the mystery of an erotic encounter with Achilles on a desolate Egyptian shore, where the lovers share in a mystic union, accompanied by a visionary “flash in heaven . . . that blinds the sun.” In H. D.’s symbology Egypt represents hermetic mystery, and Helen’s contact there with the “Dark Absolute” of love and death is an intersection of time and timelessness, a mystery containing the secrets of the “indecipherable Amenscript,” the living hieroglyphs which would reveal its personal and universal meaning. Despite Helen’s efforts to forget it, the riddle of this meeting persists: She wonders, “Must I forever look back?” Haunted by the portent of her vision, Helen travels from Egypt to Leuké, the white island where the aged Theseus helps her to decipher her own mind, a living hieroglyph, by integrating myth and memories of past lovers into a single reborn creative consciousness: “My Psyche, disappear into the web.” “All myth,” Theseus tells her, “the one reality, dwells here,” and with the figurative rebirth of Leuké—“her island, her egg-shell”—Helen assays to “bring the moment and infinity together in time,” to read the riddle of the psyche. For H. D. Greece symbolizes the intellect, and, under the spiritual aide of Theseus, Helen brings the scripts of her memories under the light of consciousness. As she prepares a return to Achilles, her inward struggle finally transcends the self’s narcissistic maze, what she calls “the threat of Labyrinth.” Her entreaty for reunion with Achilles—“There is one prayer, may he find the way”—culminates in an empathetic vision of vulnerability and love. Following this liberation from the self’s labyrinth, the poem’s third section traces Helen’s successful attempt to reconcile herself and Achilles, to interpret the intricacies of the “one image, one picture” that embodies their mystic union. If the Helen of “Palinode” is paralyzed by visionary awe, and Theseus’s Helen undertakes an intellectual analysis, then “this third Helen,” H. D. reveals, “is concerned with the human content of the drama.” Beyond the intellect’s sovereignty, the third part

reasserts the mystery of the timeless “Absolute” and its incarnations in the particularity of personal history, the human content. Finally able to discern the interlocking patterns of universal myth and individual memory, Helen finds that “the simple path refutes at last the threat of Labyrinth” and yields “the clue to the rest of the mystery.” H. D. suggests that the human condition, neither transcendent nor intellectual but “numb with memory,” is irreducible to vision or intellect and that self-knowledge only comes by discerning the complex mysteries that link us to other people and to the past Like Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805), the modernist epic’s great precursor, Helen in Egypt records the growth of a poet’s mind. H. D.’s vision of unity is unrivaled by her modernist contemporaries, who often emphasize frustration and alienation. Her interest is spiritual redemption and renewal, but unlike Lawrence’s and Eliot’s promethean and ascetic extremities, H. D.’s vision recognizes our psychological vulnerability. Although H. D.’s insistence on unity is at odds with much of contemporary literary and cultural theory, her focus on eros and the recovery of a “lost” voice prefigures feminist thought and the contemporary revision of historical narratives. Helen in Egypt stands among the most complete and complex of the modernist long poems, representing the crowning achievement of H. D.’s poetic and spiritual vision.

BIBLIOGRAPHY DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. H. D. The Career of That Struggle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Friedman, Susan Stanford, ed. Signets: Reading H. D. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1990. Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. “Seaward: H. D.’s ‘Helen in Egypt’ as a Response to Pound’s ‘Cantos’.” Twentieth Century Literature 44.4 (1998): 464–483. Anthony J. Cuda

HELLER, MICHAEL (1937– )

Michael Heller has been publishing poetry and establishing himself as a sort of modern-day, poetic Spinoza. His work is influenced equally by Jewish tradition and mysticism as by philosophy in the poststructuralist mode. Early influences on Heller’s poetry include George OPPEN, Carl RAKOSI, and Louis ZUKOFSKY of the

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and Heller’s work carries on this legacy. Heller’s other principal influence is the secular, German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. Heller was born in New York City but spent a part of his youth in Miami. His poetic approach is informed by his descent from a distinguished line of Polish rabbis, as well by the nonreligious household in which he was raised. Heller’s first full-length volume of poetry was Accidental Center (1972), followed by Knowledge (1979), which includes the notable sequence “BIALYSTOK STANZAS”; other volumes followed, including the memoir Living Root (2000). Heller has received a number of awards and honors, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America for his critical work on the objectivist poets, Convictions Net of Branches (1985). “Like [Charles] REZNIKOFF,” Burt Kimmelman has written, “Heller has also explored his Jewish heritage, at the heart of which lies the concept of textuality” (111). Heller expresses his sense of Jewish culture and influence as follows: “The history of the Jews as given in the Pentateuch, half-‘fact’ and half ‘fiction’ or ‘legend,’ establishes primarily, via this very indeterminacy, the possibility of being endlessly rethought” (Living Root 33). Beyond the specifically Jewish, Heller’s work struggles with the growing divide between language and experience, teasing out the relationships between spaces and emotions. In the title piece of In the Builded Place (1989), Heller uses the setting of New York, which the poet dubs a “broken world,” fragmented both on the level of vision and being, to interpolate romantic love. The speaker and his lover “are joined as one in the street-lamp’s light, / A corrosive light: dissolve, dissolve.” Heller would claim that what’s most fragile and alive in love is also what’s most open and alive in one’s use of language,” Thomas Gardner has commented on this poem. “[B]oth follow from a skeptical acknowledgment of limits, an acceptance of the fact of isolation” (93). These limits can also be seen in such a poem as “The American Jewish Clock” (1989), in which Heller depicts his immigrant grandfather, once named “Zalman,” now called “Solomon,” and his failure to assimilate with American culture: “In the vast / benumbed space of us, a little more sound to place him”; the empty sound, the extra syllable in his Ameri-

canized name, lengthening and legitimizing, it serves as an iconic reminder of his roots, instead of his new life. Heller has stated that he wants the influence of his poetry to be “widest, total, [and] transformative”: “Poets are the Cosmic Monsters and fascists of language, or they are irrelevant” (“Interview”). Heller’s quest for wideness, totality, and transformation continues to the present day, as he sets himself a course to balance linguistic control and the urge to surrender to the events of his time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Gardner, Thomas. “‘Speaking the Estranged of Things’: On Michael Heller.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 10 (fall 1993): 92–95. Heller, Michael. Interview by J. M. Spalding, Cortland Review. Available on-line. URL: www.cortlandreview.com/ features/october98. Downloaded May 2002. ———. Living Root: A Memoir. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. Kimmleman, Burt. “Michael Heller.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Fourth Series. American Poets since World War II, edited by Joseph Conte. Detroit: Gayle Research, 1996, pp. 108–119. Andrew E. Mathis

“HERITAGE” COUNTEE CULLEN (1925) Countee CULLEN’s poem “Heritage” was first published in the special March 1, 1925, issue of Survey Graphic magazine edited by Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke. Later that year, the New Negro, an expanded version of the March Survey Graphic, reprinted the poem. In between these two HARLEM RENAISSANCE landmarks, Cullen’s first book, Color, was published. Color features a version of “Heritage” that is 26 lines longer than the New Negro version, with the stanzas reordered, the punctuation drastically altered, and a dedication to his close friend Harold Jackman added. By and large, the Color text has been the source for subsequent republications of “Heritage.” Immediately celebrated, “Heritage” was anthologized nearly a dozen times once it appeared in the 1931 second edition of James Weldon JOHNSON’s The Book of American Negro Poetry. Despite its canonization “Heritage” is a somewhat controversial work. Some readers consider it derivative of white primitivist writ-