On May 25, 1960, H.D. traveled from Europe back to New York to receive the Award of Merit Medal for Poetry at a joint ceremony hosted by the American Academy of Arts & Letters and the National Institute of Arts & Letters. Mark Van Doren made the presentation. "The poems...are so terse, so passionate, and so clear - in other words, so Greek - that they can best be celebrated on this day by giving back to her a few lines." And he quotes from Sea Garden (1916): "you say there is no hope / to conjure you... // But we bring violets..." "H.D.," Van Doren concluded, "to you these lines, those violets and this medal." And here's part of H.D.'s very brief acceptance speech:Winged words, we know, make their own spiral - caught up in them, we are lost, or found. It is what a poem does, or can do, timelessly, having no charted orbit, or, if it has, then charted with those space instruments which only the spirit provides. / This winged victory belongs to the poem, not to the poet. But to share in the making of a poem it the privilege of a poet, and so I can thank you for measuring in space the whirr of my sometimes over-intense and over-stimulated, breathless meters."
I'm fascinated by this occasion and will doubtless later have more to say about it. For one thing, William Carlos Williams, ill and feeble, made the trip into Manhattan to be briefly reunited with H.D. after many years.MORE... on H.D. in '60.
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
