H.D., Imagiste!
Reading Poetry by: Hilda Doolittle

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H.D., Hilda Doolittle (born in 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, died in 1961 in Zurich), was one of the central poets of literary modernism and Imagism. She was in close contact with key figures of the international avant-garde, foremost among them Ezra Pound, who early on recognized her unparalleled talent. “I hand you the real thing,” he wrote to Harriet Monroe in a letter in 1912, enclosing several poems by H.D.

H.D.’s fame—a fame among initiates—passed through several stages: an early Imagist phase in the years before and during the First World War, a mythopoetic phase between the wars, and a visionary late phase during and after the Second World War. In between, in the first half of the 1930s, she underwent analytic sessions with Sigmund Freud, about which she later wrote a significant book that appeared in its final version in 1956: Tribute to Freud. Her verse, with which she primarily secured her place in the canon, was early on praised for having brought the hard light of Greece back into English-language poetry. Indeed, the texts of her debut Sea Garden (1916) teem with “honigsuchenden, goldgegürteten” swarms of bees, with sea deities, dryads and Nereids, as well as “fließfüßigen Nymphen” bearing Illyrian iris as offerings. Yet in what is perhaps her most important late work, Helen in Egypt, written in the 1950s and published posthumously in the year of her death, she also engages productively with Greek myth, radically retelling the story of the abducted Helen. Particularly noteworthy, moreover, is a second posthumously published book in which H.D. describes her late love for a man thirty years her junior: Hermetic Definition, which was brilliantly translated into German by Ulrike Draesner under the title Heimliche Deutung (Urs Engeler Editor 2006).

In reading & conversation Ulrike Draesner, Donna Stonecipher
Moderation Ryan Ruby