Asphodel

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Perdita Schaffner and the New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to publish Asphodel. I also wish to thank Mrs. Schaffner and the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, as well as the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, for permission to quote from unpublished H.D. material in the Introduction and Appendix.

Any serious editing project is a collaborative effort, and I have benefited from the advice of many persons within and outside the community of H.D. scholars. From the start, the wisdom and support of Susan Stanford Friedman and Louis H. Silverstein have been invaluable; they read drafts of the introductory material and made suggestions about problematic details in H.D.’s text. I am also grateful for the kind encouragement of Perdita Schaffner.

I would like to thank D. Thomas Benediktson and Eileen Gregory for information about H.D.’s classical allusions; Corinna del Greco Lobner, Jane Nicholson, and Vibeke Petersen for advice about H.D.’s use of foreign languages; and Louis H. Silverstein, Charles Timbrell, and Caroline Zilboorg for biographical information about H.D. and her friends. Thanks also to Joanne Cornell, Michael Davis, Lars Engle, Norman Grabo, Monty Montee, Mary O’Toole, and Omar Pound for reading portions of this text and providing helpful criticisms. It was Gary Burnett who first made me aware of Asphodel; our early conversations about H.D. were an inspiration and a spur.

Thanks also to Diana Collecott, Joseph A. Kestner, David Kramer, A. Walton Litz, John Logan, Claus Melchior, Adalaide Morris, Lawrence Rainey, Caroline Rittenhouse, Kathy A. Sears, and Patricia Willis. I would also like to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Steve Jones and the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Sidney F. Huttner and the staff at Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; and Leslie A. Morris and the staff at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.

I also want to express my gratitude to Duke University Press and its editors for their excellent work. This edition would not have been possible without the advice and sensitive collaboration of Joanne Ferguson, who supported this project from its inception.

Special thanks to the owners and proprietors of Silverleigh for their friendship, hospitality, and conversation, and to Monty Montee for his patience and refreshingly ironic smile.

A National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in 1989 provided a crucial early impetus and allowed me to travel to archives.