Author’s speak their views through their work and through their work they are able to express themselves and those few authors that can create their views into a piece of work are the few that make it beautiful. An authors greatest weapon is the pen and with that pen authors can create pictures and beautiful poems through writing and their diction is their ammunition that feeds the work and makes it their own. With diction, imagery and tone Hilda Doolittle and Edgar Allan Poe show contrasting views on the iconic Helen who brought love and the start of the historic Trojan War.
“Helen, thy beauty is to me, Like those Nicean barks of yore”. In these first two lines of the poem Edgar Allan Poe is already starting to praise Helen through his diction and his choice of words like “beauty” in order to describe that she was a beautiful woman. His choice of words immediately lean toward the positive side of Helen and all her glory not much like H.D. though. In Helen by H.D it is the complete opposite and she begins with the lines “All Greece hates the still eyes in the white face,”. This is clearly showing her view of Helen as almost evil like and that she is the bringer of the war. She uses her choice of words and diction by instead of praising her for her beauty in order to show the ugly side of Helen by giving a clear image of Helen’s “still eyes in the white face”.
Both authors give also give very different images of the great Helen or not so much through imagery and through this imagery they are able to imprint a picture in the readers head that sticks with them through the poem. Edgar Allan Poe describes Helen as a “brilliant window-niche” and how she is like a statue. Since statues are usually sculpted of the beautiful and brilliant at that time we can easily interpret that be “statue-like” he means the beautiful and brilliant Helen. But on the other hand H.D. describes Helen as the center of hate of all of Greece and in fact she even goes to describe the Greeks feeling of her smile as making them “hating it deeper still”.
These two poems although they are about the same person, show very different view on said person whom is also known as Helen. H.D. describes Helen as evil and witch like and the bringer of death and war through her diction while Edgar Allan Poe describes her as a beautiful statue that was so beautiful that she started a war with her beauty. Both are very different view and just goes to show that through a brilliant authors diction and imagery he or she can express their views on something like the historic Helen.
