H.D.

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

Hilda Doolittle was born on September 10, 1886, into the Moravian community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.[2] Her father, Charles, was professor of astronomy at Lehigh University,[3] and her mother, Helen (née Wolle),[4] 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,[5][6] 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".[7] She enrolled at Bryn Mawr College in 1905 to study Greek literature,[8] where she met the poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. After three terms of poor grades, H.D. withdrew from the college, studying at home until 1910.[9][10]

H.D. met poet Ezra Pound as a teenager in 1901. He became a life-long friend and played a formative role in her development as a writer. In 1905, Pound and H.D. began an on-and-off relationship[10] which included at least two engagements.[11] Although his parents were in favor of the relationship, her parents strongly objected.[8][10] 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.[12]

In 1910, Doolittle began a relationship with Frances Josepha Gregg, a young female art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.[13] Inspired by Gregg, H.D. wrote her first published poems, modeled after the work of Theocritus.[14] Some of her early work, including some children's stories about astronomy, was published in New York newspapers and Presbyterian newsletters.[4][15]

H.D. traveled to London in May 1911 to holiday with Gregg and Gregg's mother; Gregg returned home, but H.D. 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 H.D. at no. 6—and gathered to work daily in the British Museum Reading Room.[16][17]

Pound had already begun to meet with other poets in London to discuss ideas for reforming contemporary poetry,[18] and like all modernists in different artistic fields, "make it new".[19] They achieved this through the incorporation of free verse, the brevity of the tanka and haiku forms, and the removal of unnecessary verbiage. Pound, H.D. and Aldington became known as the "three original Imagists"[5] and published a three-point manifesto proclaiming the edicts of Imagism. According to Pound:[20][21]

We were agreed upon the three principles following:

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, H.D. told him that she found "Hilda Doolittle" to be an old fashioned and "quaint" name; he suggested the signature H.D., an abbreviation she kept for the remainder of her career.[22] 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.[23] Privately he called her "Dryad".[24]

Under the rubric Imagiste, in October 1912 Pound submitted a selection of H. D.'s poems to Harriet Monroe, founder of the magazine Poetry. 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.[23][25] These early poems are informed by her reading of Classical Greek literature, especially of Sappho,[26] an interest shared with Aldington and Pound. Her Imagist poetry is characterized by sparse language[27] and a classical, austere purity,[28] exemplified by one of her earliest and best-known poems, "Oread" (1915).[29]

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".[30] 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.[30]

H.D. married Aldington in 1913 and the following year Pound married the English artist Dorothy Shakespear.[22][4] H.D. and Aldington's only child, a daughter, was stillborn in 1915. He enlisted in the army, and she took his place as assistant editor of The Egoist, serving for the next year.[31] The couple drifted apart: he reportedly took a mistress in 1917, and she started a close but platonic relationship with the English writer D. H. Lawrence.[32]

In 1918, H.D.'s brother Gilbert was killed in action. She moved to Cornwall that March with the Scottish composer Cecil Gray, a friend of Lawrence. She became pregnant with Gray's child,[33] but by the time she realized she was expecting, the relationship had cooled and Gray had returned to London.[34] H.D. learned that her father died, having never recovered from Gilbert's death.[9] Despondent and sick with the Spanish flu, she came close to death during the birth of their daughter Perdita Aldington in 1919.[35][36]

H.D. and Aldington tried to salvage their relationship but failed, in part because of his post-war post-traumatic stress disorder, but especially because of her pregnancy with Gray. They became estranged but did not divorce until 1938.[37]

Bryher photographed in 1923 by Man Ray

She began a relationship with the wealthy English novelist Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) after meeting in Cornwall in July 1918 .[38] Bryher was younger than H.D. by several years, a lesbian, and equally non-conformist.[39][40] Both women were unusually tall, a fact that made H.D. self-conscious, and they made for a striking couple at social occasions.[40]

They lived together on and off until 1950.[41] Although both had numerous other partners, Bryher remained her lover for the rest of her life.[39]

Bryher entered a marriage of convenience with the American writer and publisher Robert McAlmon, allowing him to use some of her wealth to fund his Paris-based Contact Press publishing house.[42] In 1923, H.D. and Bryher traveled to Egypt for the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb, before settling in Switzerland.[9]

H.D.'s first book, Sea Garden, was published in 1916. She wrote one of her few known statements on poetics, Notes on Thought and Vision, in 1919, although it was not published until 1982.[43] In it, she speaks of poets (including herself) as belonging to a kind of elite group of visionaries with the power to "turn the whole tide of human thought".[44]

Poetry and novella cycles are a feature of H.D.'s early 1920s writing.[45] The first, "Magna Graeca", consists of 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.[45]

H.D. in 1922

Her mother died in 1927.[46] Bryher divorced McAlmon that year to marry Kenneth Macpherson, then H.D.'s male lover.[47][48] Bryher, Macpherson and H.D. lived and traveled together through Europe together in what the New York School poet Barbara Guest termed a "menagerie of three".[39] Bryher adopted H.D.'s daughter, Perdita, while still married Macpherson: leading to the change of name to Perdita Macpherson.[49][47][50] Later, Bryher named Perdita as heir to her will.[48] They moved to the shores of Lake Geneva where they lived in a Bauhaus villa.[51] H.D. became pregnant in 1928 and got an abortion.[52]

In 1927, Bryher and Macpherson founded the monthly magazine, Close Up, as a venue for the discussion of cinema.[9] 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.[53] In the 1930 POOL film Borderline, the actors were H.D. and Bryher and the couple Paul and Eslanda Robeson, the latter appearing as wife and husband.[54] The film explores extreme psychic states, racism, and interracial relationships.[55] H.D. wrote an explanatory pamphlet to accompany the film.[56]

Although not published until 1960, in 1927 H.D. wrote the thinly disguised roman à clef Bid Me to Live.[57] Some characters are recognizable as members of the wartime Bloomsbury Group, including Lawrence and his wife Frieda, Pound, and Captain Jack White—the Irish revolutionary drifter with whom H.D. herself appears caricatured in the Lawrence novel Aaron's Rod (1922).[58]

H.D. began psychoanalysis in 1928 with the Freudian Hanns Sachs[9] and traveled to Vienna in 1933 for analysis with Sigmund Freud.[59] She became interested in Freud's theories since 1909 after reading his works in the original German,[60] and was referred by Bryher's psychoanalyst because of her apparent paranoia about the rise of Adolf Hitler. World War I 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 traumatized by combat; and she believed that the shock at hearing of the sinking the RMS Lusitania indirectly caused the miscarriage of her child.[61] H.D. undertook two series of analysis with Freud (March to May 1933 and October to November 1934)[41] and on his request wrote Bid me to Live (published 1960), in which she details her traumatic war experiences.[62] 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 together with Advent, a journal of the analysis, under the title Tribute to Freud.[63]

Hilda and Bryher spent World War II in London. While there, her daughter Perdita became a secretary of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).[51] 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.[64] 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). H.D. wrote the first 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.[65] The opening lines of The Walls do not Fall clearly and immediately signal her break with her earlier work:[66]

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

H.D.'s 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.[67] 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.[68]

H.D. in later years

H.D.'s later work drew heavily from her eclectic blend of Christianity, Ancient Greek and Egyptian religion, Spiritualism,[69] Hermeticism,[70] Martinism and Cabala via the works of Robert Ambelain,[71] alchemy,[72] tarot,[73] astrology,[72] and Freudian psychoanalysis. She used the medium of the long poem to explore and communicate this mix of spiritualities.[74]

H.D. wrote her longest and final epic poem, Helen in Egypt, between 1952 and 1954 when she was in her 60s. However, it was not published until just before her death in 1961.[75] It is based Euripides' trilogy drama Helen, but imagines Helen of Troy's life after the fall of Troy and her relocation to Egypt. The poem reconstructs the source material into a feminist reinterpretation,[76][77] and has thus been described as "exploring ... [but] ... concluding" the themes as her earlier work.[75] Helen in Egypts 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'".[78]

A compilation of her late poems were published posthumously in 1972 under the title Hermetic Definition.[63] 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.[79] "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.[80]

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.[81][82]

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.[83] She was survived by Bryher and her daughter Perdita.[47] 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":[84]

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