H.D.

H.D. (born September 10, 1886, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died September 27, 1961, Zürich, Switzerland) was an American poet, known initially as an Imagist. She was also a translator, novelist-playwright, and self-proclaimed “pagan mystic.”

Hilda Doolittle’s father was an astronomer, and her mother was a pianist. She was reared in the strict Moravian tradition of her mother’s family. From her parents she gained, on her father’s side, an intellectual inheritance, and, on her mother’s, an artistic and mystical one. (The Moravians, descended in part from the German Pietists, stressed spirituality and belief in God’s grace.) She entered Bryn Mawr College in 1904 and, while a student there, formed friendships with Marianne Moore, a fellow student, and with Ezra Pound (to whom she was briefly engaged) and William Carlos Williams, who were at the nearby University of Pennsylvania. Ill health forced her to leave college in 1906. Five years later she traveled to Europe for what was to have been a vacation but became a permanent stay, mainly in England and Switzerland. Her first published poems, sent to Poetry magazine by Pound, appeared under the initials H.D., which remained thereafter her nom de plume. Other poems appeared in Pound’s anthology Des Imagistes (1914) and in the London journal The Egoist, edited by Richard Aldington, to whom she was married from 1913 to 1938. She was closely associated for much of her adult life with the British novelist Bryher.

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H.D.’s first volume of verse, Sea Garden (1916), established her as an important voice among the radical young Imagist poets. Her subsequent volumes included Hymen (1921), Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), Red Roses for Bronze (1931), and a trilogy comprising The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and Flowering of the Rod (1946).

The Collected Poems of H.D. (1925 and 1940), Selected Poems of H.D. (1957), and Collected Poems 1912–1944 (1983) secured her position as a major 20th-century poet. She won additional acclaim for her translations (Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis and the Hippolytus of Euripides [1919] and Euripides’ Ion [1937]), for her verse drama (Hippolytus Temporizes [1927]), and for prose works such as Palimpsest (1926), Hedylus (1928), and, posthumously, The Gift (1982). Several of her books are autobiographical—including Tribute to Freud (1956); Bid Me to Live (1960); and the posthumously published End to Torment (1979), a memoir of Pound, and Hermione (1981), a semiautobiographical bildungsroman, or perhaps more accurately a Künstlerroman (portrait of the artist’s development). Helen in Egypt (1961), a volume of verse, appeared shortly after her death.

Over the years H.D.’s sharp, spare, classical, and rather passionless style took on rich mythological and mystic overtones. Analyzed by Sigmund Freud, she was preoccupied with the interior journey. She was directly concerned with the woman’s role as artist, and she used myth not only to illuminate individual, personal experience but also, it has been pointed out, to reconstruct a mythic past for women. H.D. is sometimes considered first among the Imagists, the seminal 20th-century poetic movement in the United States, though her work goes far beyond Imagism. She also helped define what came to be called free verse and was among the early users of a stream-of-consciousness narrative. Ezra Pound and other important 20th-century poets considered themselves artistically indebted to her.