‘If she could have gone to Point Pleasant, listened to the sea, everything would come right… escape through barriers…’ (H.D., HERmione). Shorelines and natural borders recur throughout H.D.’s work; Atlantic coasts and English coasts in her prose, Greek islands and deconstructed dreamscapes in her poetry, even riverbanks and animal cages in her work with Pool Films. In this essay, I examine the way in which H.D.’s shores construct “new spaces” in which H.D. tests the definitions and boundaries of conventional society, including the break between “elsewhere” and “here” in the imaginations of the novel HERmione, the space between beauty and ugliness in the coastal wildflower poems of Sea Garden, and the construction of a space in which man and nature are unified in ‘Oread’. Hidden in these spaces are implications for H.D.’s dealings with androgyny and gender, and a vision for a more unified natural world and environmental poetic.peer-reviewe
