HELEN IN EGYPT H. D. [Hilda Doolittle] & GREGORY, Horace (introduction)

Her poem is not just a simple retelling of Helen’s story, but an active reclamation of epic territory in order that it may include a feminine principle of love and an acknowledgement of female power. The epic form is linked by H.D. to the dominance of masculinist values of war over the feminised principle of love.

The fabulous beauty of Helen of Troy is legendary. But some say that Helen was never in Troy, that she had been conveyed by Zeus to Egypt, and that Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion. A fifty-line fragment by the poet Stesichorus of Sicily (c. 640-555 B.C.), what survives of his Pallinode, tells us almost all we know of this other Helen, and from it H. D. wove her book-length poem. Yet Helen in Egypt is not a simple retelling of the Egyptian legend but a recreation of the many myths surrounding Helen, Paris, Achilles, Theseus, and other figures of Greek tradition, fused with the mysteries of Egyptian hermeticism.