Both flower and flower gatherer: Medbh McGuckian's The Flower Master and H.D.'s Sea Garden

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2003 by Lesley Wheeler

Design changes mark not only the radical nature of the revisions but the poet's shifting view of her own project. The 1932 Georgia O'Keeffe painting "The White Trumpet Flower" on the cover of the 1982 edition suggests sympathies with female modernism; it also embodies McGuckian's lyrics closeup and without context, iconically feminine and verging on abstraction. For the 1993 version, the colors shift from vernal white and green to an earthy gold and brown. A bleached-out black-and-white photograph on the new cover shows a middle-aged woman kneeling to tend, or perhaps pick, flowers growing along the wall of a house. The door stands open and the woman glances up at the camera, caught at work, not posing. McGuckian here gives us not only the bloom but the gardener; further, a path beside her and a stone house in the background emphasize the gardener's connections to a larger world. The canonical familiarity of O'Keeffe's flowers stresses mastery and the ascendance of aesthetics over context; the snapshot of McGuckian's maternal grandmother (7) suggests an arrangement shaped by a particular time and place, and it accents McGuckian's artistic commitments to process and accident. Even as McGuckian seems to perfect her earlier vision, she highlights the contingent nature of her effort and the status of women both as aesthetic objects and as creators.

Two other changes affect my argument. By paring away "The Butterfly Farm" and "The Katydid," McGuckian obscures the Asian allusions in other pieces, such as "The Flower Master"--an issue I treat more fully below. Finally, the new dedication supports readings offered by Wills and Susan Porter that this volume negotiates the poet's place among female precursors. McGuckian offers The Flower Master (1982) to John and Liam, her husband and son. She dedicates The Flower Master and Other Poems (1993), however, "for my mother / without my father." The Gallery edition shows McGuckian considering womanhood as a subject with increasing deliberateness.

In leaf

While contemporary readers know Sea Garden primarily through the New Directions Collected Poems edited by Louis L. Martz, the volume's early presentations are revealing. Constable & Co. in London published Sea Garden in 1916 in a slim, well-designed volume. The American edition, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1917, imitates many of these design qualities on lower-quality stock. (8) Both editions evoke the modernist publication strategies described by Jerome McGann and Lawrence Rainey: beautiful books in limited editions suggest an elevated art self-consciously positioned against mass culture, aimed at collectors and connoisseurs. The handsomeness and rarity of such books present a metonym for the anticommercial fineness of the writing within and thereby paradoxically indicate modernist shrewdness about marketing. (9)

McGuckian has made drastic revisions to her early work and may do so again; H.D.'s revisions occurred mainly at earlier stages. Nevertheless, biographers and scholars have been surprisingly quiet about the process of H.D.'s first book-length publication. Constable & Co. was Amy Lowell's London publisher, and H.D. published Sea Garden at Lowell's urging (Hanscombe and Smyers 204). (H.D.'s poetry had also appeared in three anthologies published by Constable, all titled Some Imagist Poets; the first one appeared in 1915). H.D.'s connection with Lowell may indicate resistance to Ezra Pound's program for imagism. However, the institutions that would transmit modernism to its audience were only beginning to form. Although Pound struggled to "gather under one roof the principal authors and works of modernism" (Rainey 82), and in fact the Egoist Press eventually produced important works by Pound, Joyce, Aldington, Eliot, and others, it didn't begin publishing books until 1916, the same year Sea Garden appeared. The Constable & Co. of the modernist era, on the other hand, published a distinguished but not adventurous literary list, most notably including Bernard Shaw (Mumby and Norrie 279, 345-46). (10)