We have had too much consecration,
too little affirmation,

too much: but this, this, this
has been proved heretical,

too little: I know, I feel,
the meaning that words hide;

they are anagrams, cryptograms,
little boxes, conditioned

to hatch butterflies...


- from The Walls Do No Fall

HD's war Trilogy ranks with Eliot's Four Quartets, Pound's Pisan Cantos and poems like Edith Sitwell's 'Still Falls the Rain' as civilian war poetry in a war which tore apart so many of the cities of Europe. The outer violence of the scene touches the deepest nerves, bringing together a remarkable range of human experience and response.

The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946) were first published in small editions which became collectors' items. They were brought together for the first time in 1973 and recognised as a major poem of our time in which HD decisively transcends the purism of her early styles. With deft indirection she uncovers, through modulation and subversion of a language burdened with history, the very heart of her concerns as a woman of this century carrying the songs and silences of earlier centuries in her bones.

Carcanet publish HD's Collected Poems 1912-1944 and her Selected Poems, as well as Tribute to Freud.