H. D

H.D.

H.D. (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961), born Hilda Doolittle, 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. However her later writing represents a move away from the Imagist model, towards a distinctly female-centric version of modernist poetry and prose.

Career

Early life

Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Her father, Charles Doolittle, was professor of astronomy at Lehigh University and her mother, Helen (Wolle), was a Moravian with a strong interest in music. In 1895, Charles Doolittle was appointed Flower Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and the family moved to a house in Upper Darby, an affluent Philadelphia suburb. She attended Philadelphia's Friends Central High School, at Fifteenth and Race streets, graduating in 1903. A year earlier, she met and befriended Ezra Pound, who was to play a major role both in her private life and her emergence as a writer. In 1905, Pound presented her with a sheaf of love poems under the collective title Hilda's Book.

That year, Doolittle attended Bryn Mawr College to study Greek literature, but she left after three terms because of bad grades and poor health. While at the college, she met the poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Her first published writings, some stories for children, were published in a local church paper between 1909 and 1913, mostly under the name Edith Gray. In 1907, she became engaged to Pound. Her father disapproved of Pound, and by the time her father left for Europe in 1908, the engagement had been called off. Around this time, Doolittle started a relationship with a young art student named Frances Josepha Gregg. After spending part of 1910 living in Greenwich Village, she sailed to Europe with Gregg and Gregg's mother in 1911.

H.D. Imagiste

Pound had already moved to London, where he had started meeting with other poets at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho to discuss plans to reform contemporary poetry through free verse, the tanka and haiku, and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage. Soon after H.D. arrived in England, she showed Pound some poems she had written. He was impressed by their closeness to the ideas he had been discussing with another poet, Richard Aldington.

During a meeting with H.D. in the British Museum tea room in 1912, Pound appended the signature H.D. Imagiste to her poetry, creating a label that was to stick to the poet for most of her writing life. That same year, Harriet Monroe started her Poetry magazine and asked Pound to act as foreign editor. In October, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the rubric Imagiste. Aldington's poems were in the November issue of Poetry and H.D.'s poems, "Hermes of the Ways," "Orchard," and "Epigram", in the January 1913 issue. Imagism as a movement was launched with H.D. as its prime exponent.

Although the early models for the imagist group were Japanese, H.D. derived her way of making poems from her reading of Classical Greek literature and especially the recently rediscovered works of Sappho, an interest she shared with Aldington and Pound, each of whom produced versions of the Greek poet's work. In 1915, H.D. and Aldington launched the Poets' Translation Series, pamphlets of translations from Greek and Latin classics. H.D. worked on the plays by Euripides, publishing Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis (1916), a translation of choruses from Iphigeneia at Aulis, Choruses from the Iphigenia in Aulis and the Hippolytus of Euripides (1919), a translation of choruses from Iphigeneia at Aulis and Hippolytus, Euripides' Ion (1937) a loose translation of Ion, an adaptation of Hippolytus called Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), and a translation of choruses from The Bacchae and Hecuba (1931).

She continued her association with the group until the final issue of the Some Imagist Poets anthology in 1917. She and Aldington did most of the editorial work on the 1915 anthology. Her work also appeared in Aldington's Imagist Anthology 1930. All of her poetry up to the end of the 1930s was written in an Imagist mode, with a spare use of language, a rhetorical structure based on analogy rather than simile, metaphor or symbolism and a classical purity of surface that can often mask an underlying dramatic energy. This style of writing was not without its critics. In a special Imagist issue of The Egoist magazine in May 1915, the poet and critic Harold Monro called H.D.'s early work "petty poetry", denoting "either poverty of imagination or needlessly excessive restraint".

Oread, one of her earliest and best-known poems, which was first published in the 1915 anthology, illustrates this early style:

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.

World War I and after

Before World War I, H.D. and Pound became involved in a romantic relationship, with H.D. also developing a romantic interest in a woman named Frances Josepha Gregg. H.D., Gregg and Gregg's mother left for Europe, where H.D. began a more serious career as a writer. Her relationship with Gregg cooled, and she met a writing enthusiast named Brigit Patmore with whom she became involved in an affair. It was Patmore who first introduced H.D. to Richard Aldington.

H.D. married Aldington in 1913. Their first and only child, a daughter, died at birth in 1915. Aldington and she became estranged after he reportedly took a mistress. Shortly after this, Aldington answered the national call to serve in the army, and H.D. became involved in a close but from all reports platonic relationship with D. H. Lawrence. In 1916, her first book, Sea Garden, appeared and she became assistant editor of The Egoist, taking over from her husband. In 1918, her brother Gilbert, a soldier, was killed in action. H.D. moved in with a friend of Lawrence's named Cecil Gray, and became pregnant with his child. When Aldington returned from active service he was not the same man, changed by war, and he and H.D. separated.

By end of the war, H.D. had met British writer Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), who was to become and remain her lover for the rest of her life. They lived together until 1946, although both took numerous other partners during that time, often sharing their male lovers. In 1919, H.D.'s daughter Frances Perdita Aldington—although the father was not Aldington, but Gray—was born, after H.D. had survived a serious bout of influenza. Her father, who had never recovered from Gilbert's death, died himself. At this time, H.D. wrote one of her very few known statements on poetics, Notes on Thought and Vision (published in 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'.

H.D. and Aldington attempted to salvage their relationship during this time, but he was suffering from the effects of his participation in the war, possibly posttraumatic stress disorder, and they became estranged, living completely separate lives, but not divorcing until 1938. From 1920 on, her lesbian relationship with Bryher became closer and the pair travelled in Egypt, Greece and the United States before eventually settling in Switzerland. In 1921, Bryher had a marriage of convenience with Robert McAlmon, enabling him to fund his publishing ventures in Paris by using some of her personal wealth for his Contact Press. Both Bryher and H. D. slept with McAlmon during this time. Bryher and McAlmon divorced in 1927.

Novels, films and psychoanalysis, continuing life and loves

In the early 1920s, H.D. started to write three projected cycles of novels. The first of these, Magna Graeca, consisted of Palimpsest (1921) and Hedylus (1928). These novels use their classical settings to explore the poetic vocation, particularly as it applies to women in a patriarchal literary culture. The Madrigal cycle consisted of HERmione, Bid Me to Live, Paint It Today and Asphodel. These novels are largely autobiographical and deal with the development of the female artist and the conflict between heterosexual and lesbian desire. Possibly because of their closeness to H.D.'s own life and the lives of her friends and loved ones, most of them were not published until after her death. Kora and Ka and The Usual Star, two novellas from the Borderline cycle, were published in 1933.

H.D. completed the first of the Madrigal cycle novels, HERmione, based on the pull between lesbian and heterosexual love in her own life. In her personal life, her mother had died, her lesbian lover Bryher had divorced her husband and H.D.'s lover, McAlmon, only to marry H.D.'s new male lover, Kenneth Macpherson. Following this, H.D., Bryher and Macpherson lived together in what the poet and critic Barbara Guest termed a 'menagerie for three.' In 1928, H.D. became pregnant but chose to abort the pregnancy in November. They set up the magazine Close Up and formed the POOL cinema group to write about and make films. Only one POOL film survives in its entirety, Borderline (1930), starring H.D. and Paul Robeson. In common with the Borderline novellas, the film explores extreme psychic states and their relationship to surface reality. As well as acting in this film, H.D. wrote an explanatory pamphlet to accompany it, a piece later published in Close Up.

In 1933, H.D. travelled to Vienna in order to undergo analysis with Sigmund Freud. She had long been interested in his ideas, which is evident from the pamphlet on Borderline as well as some of her earlier works. She was referred to him by Bryher's psychoanalyst due to her increasing paranoia about the approach of World War II—and the first Great War (World War I) had left her feeling shattered. She had lost her brother in action, while her husband suffered effects of combat experiences, and she believed that the onslaught of the war indirectly caused the death of her child with Aldington: she also believed it was her shock at hearing the news about the RMS Lusitania that directly caused her miscarriage.

The rise of Adolf Hitler indicated another world war, an idea that H.D. found intolerable. Writing on the Wall, her memoir about this analysis, 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

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 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.'

After the war, H.D. and Bryher no longer lived together, but remained in contact. 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. Doolittle was one of the leading figures in the bohemian culture of London in the early decades of the century. Her work is noted for its use of classical models and its exploration of the conflict between lesbian and heterosexual attraction and love, with these struggles closely resembling her own life.

Her later poetry explores traditional epic themes, such as violence and war, from a feminist perspective. H.D. was the first woman to be granted the American Academy of Arts and Letters medal.

Later life

During the 1950s, H.D. wrote a considerable amount of poetry, most notably Helen in Egypt (written between 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. Other poems from this period include 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.

In 1960, H.D. was in the United States to collect the American Academy of Arts and Letters medal. Returning to Switzerland, she suffered a stroke in July 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, 1961. Her epitaph consists of the following lines from an early poem:

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

Legacy

The rediscovery of H.D. began in the 1970s, and coincided with the emergence of a feminist criticism that found much to admire in the questioning of gender roles typical of her writings. Specifically, those critics who were challenging the standard view of English-language literary modernism based on the work of such male writers as Pound, Eliot and James Joyce, were able to restore H.D. to a more significant position in the history of that movement. Her writings have served as a model for a number of more recent women poets working in the modernist tradition. Examples include the New York School poet Barbara Guest, the Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov and the Language poet Susan Howe. Her influence is not limited to female poets, and many male writers, including Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, have acknowledged their debt.

Notes

Sources

Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World. Collins, 1985. ISBN 0-385-13129-1
Taylor, Georgina. H.D. and the public sphere of modernist women writers. Oxford University Press, 2001.