H.D.

Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania – September 27, 1961, Zürich), prominently known only by her initials H.D., was an American poet, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her association with the key early 20th-century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, although her later writing represents a move away from the Imagist model and towards a distinctly feminine version of modernist poetry and prose.

World War II and after

H.D. and Bryher spent the duration of World War II in London. During this time, H.D. wrote The Gift, a memoir of her childhood and family life in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which reflects on people and events in her background that helped shape her as a writer. The Gift was eventually published in 1982. She also wrote Trilogy, published as The Walls do not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). This three-part poem on the experience of the blitz ranks with Pound's Pisan Cantos and T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding as a major modernist response to the war as seen from a civilian perspective. The poems also represent the first fruit of her new approach to writing poetry, with a much looser and more conversational tone and diction being used as well as a more inclusive approach to experience. The opening lines of The Walls do not Fall clearly and immediately signal H.D.'s break with her earlier Imagist poetic: 'An incident here and there, / and rails gone (for guns) / from your (and my) old town square.'

Related Topics:
World War II - 1982 - Blitz - Pisan Cantos - T.S. Eliot - Little Gidding

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After the war, H.D. moved to Switzerland where, in the spring of 1946, she suffered a severe mental breakdown which resulted in her staying in a clinic until the autumn of that year. Apart from a number of trips to the States, H.D. spent the rest of her life in Switzerland. In the late 1950s, she underwent more treatment, this time with the psychoanalyst Erich Heydt. At Heydt's prompting, she wrote End to Torment, a memoir of her relationship with Pound, who allowed the poems of Hilda's Book to be included when the book was published.

Related Topics:
Switzerland - 1946 - Mental breakdown - 1950s

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During this decade, she wrote a considerable amount of poetry, most notably Helen in Egypt (written 1952–54), a feminist deconstruction of male-centred epic poetry which uses Euripides's play Helen as a starting point for a reinterpretation of the basis of the Trojan War and, by extension, of war itself. This work has been seen by some critics, including Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, as H.D.'s response to Pound's Cantos, a work she greatly admired.

Related Topics:
Epic poetry - Euripides - Trojan War - Cantos

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The other poems of this period are "Sagesse", "Winter Love" and "Hermetic Definition". These three were published posthumously with the collective title Hermetic Definition (1972). The poem "Hermetic Definition" 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", written in bed after H.D. had broken her hip in a fall, serves as a kind of 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 together with 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.

Related Topics:
1972 - Coda - Atom bomb - Homer - Penelope

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In 1960, H.D. was in the U.S. to collect the American Academy of Arts and Letters medal. Returning to Switzerland, she suffered a stroke in July of 1961 and died a couple of months later in the Klinik Hirslanden in Zürich. Her ashes were returned to Bethlehem, and were buried in the family plot in the Nisky Hill Cemetery on October 28. Her epitaph consists of the following lines from an early poem:

Related Topics:
1960 - Stroke - 1961 - October 28 - Epitaph

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:So you may say,

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:Greek flower; Greek ecstasy

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:reclaims forever

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:one who died

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:following intricate song's

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:lost measure.

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