H.D.

For other uses, see HD (disambiguation).

H.D.
H.D. circa 1917, photographed by Man Ray
Born	Hilda Doolittle (1886-09-10)September 10, 1886 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, US
Died	September 27, 1961(1961-09-27) (aged 75) Zürich, Switzerland
Alma mater	Bryn Mawr College
Occupations	Poet novelist memoirist
Signature

Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an early modernist poet, novelist and essayist, who used H.D. as her pseudonym. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with the American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist, free verse works drew international attention.

Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to wealthy and educated parents who later relocated the family to Upper Darby in 1896. She attended Bryn Mawr College between 1904 and 1906, where she had her first lesbian relationship. After years of friendship, she developed a romantic relationship with Pound. She followed Pound to London in 1911, where he championed and published her work. She was associate literary editor of the Egoist journal between 1916 and 1917, and was published by the English Review and Transatlantic Review. During World War I, she suffered the death of her brother and the breakup of her 1913 marriage to the writer and poet Richard Aldington. She was treated by Sigmund Freud during the 1930s, looking to understand both her war trauma and bisexuality.

During her five-decade career, Doolittle wrote in a wide range of genres and formats. She became closely associated with Imagism and Pound, and her later and more complex works were largely overshadowed. Following a reappraisal by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s, she is today considered one of the foremost 20th-century modernist poets. She was interested in Ancient Greek literature and published numerous translations. Her poetry often borrows from Greek mythology and classical poets, and ranges from the Imagism of her youth to the epic poems composed from the 1940s, the best known of which is "Helen in Egypt" (1952–1954). These works are noted for their incorporation of natural scenes and objects, often used to evoke a particular feeling or mood. She wrote several novels, including Hedylus (1928), Palimpsest (1926), and Bid Me to Live (1960).

Life and Work

Early life

File:Cover of "End to Torment", by H.D.jpg

Cover of H.D.'s 1958 book End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound showing the couple as they were in the 1910s

Hilda Doolittle was born on September 10, 1886, into the Moravian community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her father, Charles, was professor of astronomy at Lehigh University, and her mother, Helen (née Wolle), was a member of the Moravian brotherhood. Hilda was their only daughter in a family with five sons. When Charles was appointed professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania to take charge of the Flower Observatory, they moved to Upper Darby. She attended Friends' Central School in Philadelphia and graduated in 1905, delivering a commencement address entitled "The Poet's Influence".

Doolittle enrolled at Bryn Mawr College in 1905 to study Greek literature, where she met the poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. After three terms of poor grades, she withdrew from the college, but she continued to study at home until 1910.

Doolittle met poet Ezra Pound as a teenager in 1901. He became a life-long friend and played a major role in her development as a writer. In 1905, Pound and Doolittle began an on-and-off relationship which included at least two engagements. Although his parents were in favor of the relationship, her parents strongly objected. In 1907, Pound gave her Hilda's Book, a handmade vellum binding of twenty-five of his earliest love poems, which he dedicated to her.

In 1910, Doolitle started a relationship with Frances Josepha Gregg, a young female art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Inspired by Gregg, Doolittle wrote her first published poems, modeled after the work of Theocritus. Some of her early work, including some children's stories about astronomy, was published in New York newspapers and Presbyterian newsletters.

Imagism

Doolittle travelled to London in May 1911 to holiday with Gregg and Gregg's mother; Gregg returned home, but Doolittle stayed to develop a career as a writer. Pound introduced her to his friends, including English writer Brigit Patmore. Patmore introduced her to Richard Aldington, who became her husband in 1913. The three lived in Church Walk, Kensington—Pound at no. 10, Aldington at no. 8, and Doolittle at no. 6—and gathered to work daily in the British Museum Reading Room.

Pound had already begun to meet with other poets in London to discuss ideas for reforming contemporary poetry, and like all modernists in different artistic fields, "make it new". They achieved this through the incorporation of free verse, the brevity of the tanka and haiku forms, and the removal of unnecessary verbiage. Pound, Doolittle and Aldington became known as the "three original Imagists" and published a three-point manifesto proclaiming the edicts of Imagism:

1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose poetry in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

During a 1912 conversation with Pound, Doolittle told him that she found her full name old fashioned and "quaint"; he suggested the signature H.D., an abbreviation she kept for the remainder of her career. After he "scrawled the name H.D. Imagiste" at the bottom of the page of her poem "Hermes of the Ways", she adopted H.D. as a pen. Privately he called her "Dryad".

Under the rubric Imagiste, Pound submitted some of H. D.'s poems to Harriet Monroe, founder of the magazine Poetry, in October 1912. Three of her poems were published in the January 1913 issue—"Hermes of the Ways" (Pound said "this is poetry" after reading), "Priapus: Keeper of Orchards" (later renamed "Orchard"), and "Epigram"—alongside three by Aldington. These early poems are informed by her reading of Classical Greek literature, especially of Sappho, an interest shared with Aldington and Pound. Her early poetry is written in the Imagist mode, and characterized by sparse language and a classical, austere purity, exemplified by one of her earliest and best-known poems, "Oread" (1915).

Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.

The style was not without its critics. In a dedicated Imagist issue of The Egoist magazine in May 1915, the English poet and critic Harold Monro named H.D. as the "truest Imagist", but dismissed her early work as "petty poetry", denoting "either poverty of imagination or needlessly excessive restraint". In contrast, a 1927 review by the British modernist author and critic May Sinclair described "Oread"'s brevity as a "miracle" and criticized Monro for not recognizing it.

World War I and after

H.D. married Aldington in 1913 and the following year Pound married Dorothy Shakespear. H.D. and Aldington's only child, a daughter, was stillborn in 1915. He enlisted in the army, after which they drifted apart: he reportedly took a mistress in 1917 and she started a close but platonic relationship with D. H. Lawrence.

Her first book, Sea Garden, was published in 1916. In June of that year she was appointed assistant editor of The Egoist as a substitute for Aldington after he enlisted in the army. In 1918, her brother Gilbert was killed in action. That March she moved to Cornwall with the composer Cecil Gray, a friend of Lawrence. She became pregnant with Gray's child, but by the time she realised she was expecting, the relationship had cooled and Gray had returned to London.

H.D. and Aldington attempted to salvage their relationship but failed in part because of his post-war post-traumatic stress disorder. Although estranged and living apart, they did not divorce until 1938.

She met the wealthy English novelist Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) in Cornwall in July 1918. They lived together on and off until 1950, and although both had numerous other partners, Bryher remained her lover for the rest of her life. In 1919, H.D. came close to death during the birth of her daughter Frances Perdita Aldington—fathered by Gray—while suffering from war influenza. During this time, her father died, having never recovered from Gilbert's death. In 1919, H.D. wrote one of her few known statements on poetics, Notes on Thought and Vision, which was unpublished until 1982. In this, she speaks of poets (herself included) as belonging to a kind of elite group of visionaries with the power to "turn the whole tide of human thought".

She grew closer with Bryher during 1920. However, the following year Bryher entered a marriage of convenience with Robert McAlmon, allowing him to fund his publishing ventures in Paris by using some of her wealth for his Contact Press. In 1923, H.D. and Bryher travelled to Egypt and attended the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb, before settling in Switzerland that year. Both Bryher and H.D. slept with McAlmon during this time. Bryher and McAlmon divorced in 1927.

Novels and psychoanalysis

H.D. in 1922

H.D. wrote three poetry cycles in the early 1920s. The first, Magna Graeca, includes the poems Palimpsest (1921) and Hedylus (1928), which use classical settings to explore the role of a poet, particularly a female's value in a patriarchal literary culture. The following cycles, HERmione, Bid Me to Live, Paint It Today and Asphodel are largely autobiographical and preoccupied with the development of the female artist and the conflict between heterosexual and lesbian desire. The novellas Kora and Ka and The Usual Star from the Borderline cycle were published in 1933, followed by Pilate's Wife, Mira-Mare and Nights. At around the same time, her mother died and Bryher divorced her husband to marry H.D.'s male lover, Kenneth Macpherson. H.D., Bryher and Macpherson lived together and traveled through Europe in what the poet Barbara Guest termed as a "menagerie of three", and the couple adopted H.D.'s daughter, Perdita. They moved to the shores of Lake Geneva where they lived in a Bauhaus villa. She became pregnant for the third time in 1928, but chose to illegally abort the pregnancy in Berlin that November.

In 1927, Bryher and Macpherson founded the monthly magazine, Close Up, as a venue for the discussion of cinema. That year the independent film cinema group POOL or Pool Group was established (largely funded with Bryher's inheritance) and was managed by all three. In the 1930 POOL film Borderline, the actors were H.D. and Bryher and the couple Paul and Eslanda Robeson, the latter acting as wife and husband. The film explores extreme psychic states, racism, and interracial relationships. H.D. also wrote an explanatory pamphlet to accompany the film.

H.D. began psychoanalysis in 1928 with the Freudian Hanns Sachs, and traveled to Vienna in 1933 for analysis with Sigmund Freud. She had an interest in Freud's theories since 1909 when she read his works in the original German, and was referred by Bryher's psychoanalyst because of her apparent paranoia about the rise of Adolf Hitler. The First World War had left her feeling shattered: she lost her brother in action; her father died in reaction to the loss of his son; her husband was traumatised by combat; and she believed that the shock at hearing of the sinking the RMS Lusitania indirectly caused the miscarriage of her child. She undertook two series of analysis with Freud (March to May 1933 and October to November 1934) and on his request wrote Bid me to Live (published 1960), in which she details her traumatic war experiences. Writing on the Wall, an impressionistic memoir of the sessions and a reevaluation of the importance of his psychoanalysis, was written concurrently with Trilogy and published in 1944; in 1956 it was republished with Advent a journal of the analysis, under the title Tribute to Freud.

World War II and after

Hilda and Bryher spent World War II in London. While there, her daughter Perdita became a secretary of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Between 1941 and 1943 H.D. wrote The Gift, a short memoir of her childhood in Bethlehem that details the people and events that shaped her. She began the Trilogy series in 1942, comprising three long, unrhyming, and complex volumes of poems: The Walls do not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). The first was written while living in London and details her reactions to the Blitz and World War II. The following two books compare the ruins of London to those of ancient Egypt and classical Greece; the former of which she had seen during a 1923 visit. The opening lines of The Walls do not Fall clearly and immediately signal her break with her earlier work:

An incident here and there,
and rails gone (for guns)
from your (and my) old town square.

Her relationship with Bryher ended just after the war, although they remained in contact. She moved to Switzerland where she had a severe mental breakdown in the spring of 1946 and took refuge in a clinic until the autumn of that year. She lived in Switzerland for the rest of her life. In the late 1950s, she underwent further treatment with the psychoanalyst Erich Heydt, who supported her while she wrote End to Torment, a memoir of her relationship with Pound.

Late work

File:Hilda Doolittle, later years.jpeg

H.D. in later years

Her longest and final epic poem Helen in Egypt was completed between 1952 and 1954 when she was in her 60s, but not published until just before her death in 1961. Based on Euripides' trilogy drama Helen, it imagines Helen of Troy's life after the fall of Troy and her relocation to Egypt, and reconstructs the source material into a feminist reinterpretation, and has thus been described as "exploring ... [but] ... concluding" the themes as her earlier work. The poem's long-form and wide historical span has been seen as a response to Pound's Cantos, which she admired. In End to Torment she approved of Norman Holmes Pearson's labeling of Helen in Egypt as "her 'cantos'".

A compilation of her late poems were published posthumously in 1972 under the title Hermetic Definition. The book takes as its starting points her love for a man 30 years her junior and the line "so slow is the rose to open" from Pound's Canto 106. "Sagesse", which she wrote in bed having broken her hip in a fall, serves as a coda to Trilogy, being partly written in the voice of a young female Blitz survivor who finds herself living in fear of the atom bomb. "Winter Love" was written during the same period as End to Torment and uses as narrator the Homeric figure of Penelope to restate the material of the memoir in poetic form. At one time, H.D. considered appending this poem as a coda to Helen in Egypt.

She returned to the U.S. in 1960 to collect the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, becoming the first woman to be granted the award for poetry.

Death

H.D was left gravely ill after a stroke in July 1961 and was taken to the Klinik Hirslanden in Zürich, where she died on September 27. Her ashes were brought to Bethlehem, where they were buried in the family plot in the Nisky Hill Cemetery on October 28, 1961.

Her headstone is inscribed with lines from her early poem "Epitaph":

So you may say,
Greek flower; Greek ecstasy
reclaims forever
one who died
following intricate song's
lost measure.

Appraisal

During her long career, H.D. wrote a large number of works in a variety of styles and formats. They evolved from lyrics written in the 1910s (such as Sea Gardens), through her early period Imagist poems and free verse, to her longer and more complex "epic" poems of which the more important include her "Trilogy" (1944–1946), "Helen in Egypt" (1961), and the three-volume Hermetic Definition, comprising of the poems "Winter Love", "Sagesse", and "Vale Ave". Yet, during her lifetime, the later poems, novels and numerous translations of classical works were rarely studied or taught, and only her early poems (especially "Oread" and "Heat") appeared in anthologies. For decades her reputation was stuck as an Imagist who peaked in the 1920s; a consignment the literary critic Susan Friedman believes placed H.D. as "a captive and in prison". In 1972, Hugh Kenner wrote that assigning her as just an imagist poet was similar to evaluating "five of the shortest pieces in Harmonium [as equal to] the life's work of Wallace Stevens". In fact, although Pound claimed in the 1930s that he formed the Imagist movement "to launch H.D. and Aldington before either had enough stuff for a volume", many the of foundational poets within the group, including Amy Lowell, viewed H.D. as the main focal point and innovator in achieving the group's "revolution in taste".

H.D. was aware early on that both the strictures of Imagism and Pound's controlling temperament would constrain her creative voice, and by the mid-1920s her work had developed beyond imagism. In 1990, the feminist scholar Gertrude Reif Hughes described her as "physically fragile-looking in a traditionally feminine way". H.D. understood the danger of objectification, particularly as the only woman in a group of men in her circle. She worried about being perceived merely as their private muse, which she feared, affected her public image and standing as a poet and prominent intellectual in her own right. Female objectification is explored in "HER", where she writes of "a classic dilemma for woman: the necessity to choose between being a muse to another or being an artist oneself". Although Pound was a lifelong champion, a number of other early Imagists, including Aldington and D. H. Lawrence, attempted to diminish her importance and consign her to a minor role. Similarly, while her mid-period poems and writings explore mysticism, esotericism and the occult, in a similar manner to poets such as W.B. Yeats (with whom she was personally acquainted), H.D. was rarely read before the 1970s.

Although the critic Linda Wagner wrote in 1969 that one of the "ironies of contemporary literature [is] that H.D. is remembered chiefly for her Imagist work given that few writers have written so much in their maturity"; her reappraisal only began in the 1970s and 1980s. This coincided with the emergence of a feminist and later, LGBT, criticism movement that found much to admire in her questioning of gender roles. Specifically, critics such as Friedman (1981), Janice Robertson (1982) and Rachel DuPlessis (1986) began to challenge the standard view of English-language literary modernism as based on only the work of male writers, and gradually restored H.D. to a more significant position in the movement. In 1990, Hughes wrote that H.D. mid-century poems, like those of Gwendolyn Brooks, anticipate second-wave feminism, and explore issues raised in Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book The Second Sex. According to Hughes, H.D. challenged patriarchal privilege and "revise the mentalities that sponsor them", and notes in particular how in Helen in Egypt, she positions Helen as "the protagonist, instead of the pawn", and thus reversing some of the "conservative and often misogynistic modernism" tendencies of Pound and T. S. Eliot.

Legacy

H.D.'s writings have served as a model for a number of more recent female poets working in the modernist and post-modernist traditions, including the New York School poet Barbara Guest, the Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov, the Black Mountain poet Hilda Morley and the Language poet Susan Howe. Her influence is not limited to female poets; many male writers and poets, including Robert Duncan and have acknowledged their debt. The Dutch poet H.C. ten Berge wrote his 2008 "Het vertrapte mysterie" ("The Trampled Mystery") in memory of H.D.

During World War II, her daughter Perdita was involved in cracking codes at Bletchley Park and later worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the OSS, she served with Graham Greene and James Angleton. H.D.'s grandchildren include the author and Beatles biographer Nicholas Schaffner.

Selected works

Poetry

• Oread (1915)
• Heath (1915)
• Sea Garden (1916)
• The God (1917)
• Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis and The Hippollytus of Euripides (1919)
• Translations (1920)
• Hymen (1921)
• Heliodora and Other Poems (1924)
• Hippolytus Temporizes (1927)
• Red Roses for Bronze (1931)
• "The Mysteries: Renaissance Choros" (1931)
• Euripides' Ion (1937)
• Trilogy
  • "The Walls Do Not Fall" (1944)
  • "Tribute to the Angels" (1945)
  • "The Flowering of the Rod" (1946)
• Vale Ave (1957–58)
• Helen in Egypt (written 1952–1954, published 1961)
• Hermetic Definition (completed 1961, published 1972)
  • "Hermetic Definition"
  • "Sagesse"
  • "Winter Love"

Novels

Source: Bryer & Roblyer 1969

• Notes on Thought and Vision (1919)
• Paint it Today (1921)
• Asphodel (1921–22)
• Palimpsest (1926)
• Kora and Ka (1930)
• Nights (1935)
• The Hedgehog (1936)
• Majic Ring (1943–44)
• Pilate's Wife (1929–1934)
• The Sword Went Out to Sea (1946––47)
• White Rose and the Red (1948)
• The Mystery (1948–51)
• Tribute to Freud (1956)
• Bid Me to Live (1960)
• End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, (1979)
• HERmione, (posthumously 1981)
• The Gift, (posthumously 1982)

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• Quinn, Vincent (Winter 1977). "H. D.'s "Hermetic Definition": The Poet as Archetypal Mother". Contemporary Literature. 18 (1): 51–61. doi:10.2307/1207850. ISSN 0010-7484. JSTOR 1207850.
• Schaffner, Val (2002). "Perdita Macpherson Schaffner (1919-2001)". www.imagists.org. Archived from the original on February 24, 2021. Retrieved May 16, 2022.
• Scott, Bonnie Kime (1995). "H. D.". In Cathy N., Davidson; et al. (eds.). The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199891054 – via Oxford Reference.
• Sinclair, May (March 1927). "The poems of 'H.D.'". The Fortnightly Review. Archived from the original on July 22, 2022.
• Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey (Winter 1998). "Seaward: H. D.'s Helen in Egypt as a Response to Pound's Cantos". Twentieth Century Literature. 44 (4): 464–483. doi:10.2307/441594. ISSN 0041-462X. JSTOR 441594.
• Wagner, Linda Welshimer (Autumn 1969). ""Helen in Egypt": A Culmination". Contemporary Literature. 10 (4, Special Number on H.D.: A Reconsideration): 523–536. doi:10.2307/1207694. ISSN 0010-7484. JSTOR 1207694.
• Walton, Jean (Winter 1997). ""Nightmare of the Uncoordinated White-Folk": Race, Psychoanalysis, and Borderline". Discourse. 19 (2): 88–109. ISSN 1522-5321. JSTOR 41389446.
• Ward, A.C. (1970). Longman Companion to Twentieth Century Literature. Prentice Hall Press. ISBN 978-0-582-32803-7.
• Wilhelm, James J. (1990). Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908-1925. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 027100682X.
• Willis, Elizabeth (Spring 2007). "A Public History of the Dividing Line: H. D., the Bomb, and the Roots of the Postmodern". Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory. 63 (1): 81–108. doi:10.1353/arq.2007.0005. S2CID 162848498.

External links

• H.D. Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• Numerous archival resources are listed on ArchiveGrid.
• Works by H.D. at Project Gutenberg
• Works by H.D. at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• H.D. at Modern American Poetry