The Astral H.D. is a remarkable book, which breaks new ground in the study of the American poet H.D. (1886–1961), and in the study of Anglo-American modernism more generally. H.D.’s late work is forbidding to readers, even to those familiar with the difficulty of her imagist poems, or her Second World War long-poem sequence, Trilogy (1946). As Robinson explains, H.D.’s writing, from the time she began Helen in Egypt in 1952 onwards, forms part of a “strategy in which she works out eternal patterns in a timeless or timebound past in order to abstract the patterns and read the whole” (159). H.D., he argues, would later conceive of Helen as an early phase in an ongoing process of “authentic astral initiation” that would culminate with Hermetic Definition (written 1960). As Susan Stanford Friedman noted in Psyche Reborn, H.D. drew on French occult sources or, in Robinson's words, “the continental paramasonic tradition” (50), in this work, in particular, on Jean Chaboseau's Le Tarot and Jean Ambelain's Dans l'ombre des cathédrales (1939), Adam, dieu rouge (1941), and La Kabbale practique (1951). These sources are difficult to access both because they are rare and prized (Robinson explains that he could only obtain Chaboseau's book at a collector's price in Paris (xiii)) and because of the complexity of the material they cover. One of the major achievements of Robinson's book is to explicate and interrogate these sources, showing the many ways in which they inform H.D.’s late poetry. In an introduction and four chapters, The Astral H.D. covers H.D.’s occult education, including her spiritualist activities in the years before her discovery of the French tradition; her spiritualist “war work” in Trilogy,Footnote ¹ and her reading of Arthur Weigall's The Paganism in Our Christianity (1928); the general principles of Dans l'ombre and the influence of astral initiation and the Tarot pack on H.D.’s poetry; the Luciferian tradition, which underpins H.D.’s understanding of the blurred lines between good and evil (error), angels and demons, Adam and Eve; and the practical Kabbalah which, more than merely a source for poetry, was a source of instruction for H.D. in practical magic.

The Astral H.D. offers more, however, than a commentary on H.D.’s late work in the light of these traditions. First, Robinson's own careful study of her sources, together with his detailed knowledge of H.D.’s notebooks from this period, allows him to discriminate between H.D.’s occult activities and interests in a way that previous books on this subject have not been able to do. It comes as a revelation, then, that H.D. came to have profound reservations about spiritualism despite her own engagement in séances in the 1940s, and that when she finally came to use the word “astral” to refer to her quest, this was the result of a misreading that was, to H.D., a meaningful sign that she was on the right track (12). Many other aspects of H.D.’s life and work click into place in Robinson's study, such as the continuity between psychoanalysis and the occult when the latter is conceived, after Ambelain, as a “practical science” of the self (p. 151, emphasis in original). The Astral H.D. is a reframing not only of what we know about H.D. but also of how we have come to understand Anglo-American modernism's engagement with myth and the occult more generally. Robinson is dismissive of the tendency, beginning with James Logenbach's Stone Cottage (1988), to read modernism's occultism as a willed difficulty or elitism – an attempt beginning with Pound and Yeats in the 1910s to make modernism a boys’ club accessible only to those with the key provided by the poets. It makes no sense, Robinson points out, to conflate H.D.’s interest in the occult, a phase coinciding with a relatively prosperous and successful period of her life, with that of Yeats and Pound at a time when the latter was trying to find a way into an established literary world. Nor can it be said that the many “interlaced spiritual hierarchies” in H.D.’s occult sources are simply equivalent to or stand-ins for forms of “political, social and ethnic” elitisms seen in other modernists; as Robinson points out, they may well be “downright salutary in a world full of quacks, charlatans, sellers of snake-oil, and black magicians” (39). The brilliance of The Astral H.D. is that its virtuoso handling of complex and challenging source materials is anchored in these moments of clear-sightedness and common sense. Robinson's book seems true to the spirit of H.D.; it delves deep into the murky world of the occult without ever losing sight of what H.D. often called “the actuality of the present.”Footnote ²