About H.D.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on September 10, 1886. She enrolled at the Women's Liberal Art's College at Bryn Mawr, meeting writer Mariane Moore, and later the University of Pennsylvania where she struck a lifelong friendship with Ezra Pound, to whom she was  engaged. Her first published poems appeared in New York syndicated newspapers in 1910. She moved to London the next year. The city, and Pound’s literary circle (which included Eliot and Yeats), offered her what she felt was a much needed artistic stimulation.

H.D. is widely known for her association with the Imagist literary group under Pound's directives, which is said by many literary historians to have been created by Pound to further her career as a poet. H.D., however, was not a mere shadow of someone else's vision, nor needed someone to explain her own to others. Furthermore, she had no desire to be limited as to what she could write and the movement's boundaries could not hold H.D.'s voice. Issues of gender, language and myth served her intense poetry in poems which are hard to understand at a first glance and reflect the depths of her character.

She was published in The English Review, the Transatlantic Review, and the Egoist. From 1916 to 1917 she was the literary editor of the Egoist journal. Known primarily as a poet (her importance to the development of modern free verse is evident in the awards she won from Poetry magazine in 1915 and the Little Review in 1917), H.D. also wrote novels, memoirs and essays, and enjoyed a limited reputation as a classicist and translator of Greek. Her passion for the Greek poets Sappho and Euripidis show through in some of her work. Sea Garden, her first volume, published in 1916, evokes Greek landscapes, with its naming of various gods and shrines. However, this setting of rocky shore, forest, and flowers (showcasing her interest in nature as a recurring theme) came from her childhood in America.

In the 1930’s, she became Sigmund Freud’s friend and patient. Consulting with Freud encouraged H.D. to pursue her own dreams and visions of the “other-side of everything. Some critics will go as far as saying that her bisexuality is intimately intertwined with her writing.

H.D. was the first woman to win the Merit Medal for Poetry of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is often seen as an early icon of feminist movement, pushing through the confines of feminine conventionality. By placing the female figure as the subject, a category associated with the male, H.D. is suggesting that both men and women are and should be on the same level. Much of her work articulated strong feminist principles, as if she saw herself as an adventurer poet who felt to be her duty to show others a way out from conformity, be it cultural or poetic, towards a better reality, one which was in everyone’s best interest to try for.

H.D.’s poems seem to be about what happens when a woman of an extraordinary voice and unique vision finds a way to channel the emerging cultural psychosis of her war-torn era into poetry and purpose. She dwelved into the extremes of the human condition: love and war, birth and death, embracing these concerns as central to her five-decades spanning ouvre. You see, with H.D. it didn’t just seem academic. It seemed personal. As it should be, for poets remake the universe with words and in the images of their dreams. The rest of us must then deal with this superimposition of the poet’s inner-self on our shared reality. One side spilling into the other through doors made of words, because truth best speaks in the language of poetry and symbolism.

In the presentation, we'll be doing a close reading of “Sea Rose”, trying to focus on a more textual analysis and not so much on possible interpretations of the poem. As for those, general opinion seems to think that, in "Sea Rose" and as poetry goes, H.D. uses the symbol of the rose in an unconventional way. A question for our classmates, then, would be “why is that?” We can use the blog to discuss this topic.

Also in the presentation, we'll speak about "Oread", one of H.D.'s celebrated poems. Instead of thinking about the relationship between H.D. and the rest of the Imagist movement (which exist), another topic of discussion for pre or post-presentation comments should be to try to think about the differences: "What distinguishes H.D. from the other imagist poets?"


Luis & Nuno.

(edited  October 23rd)