H.D. Summary

H. D. (1886 - 1961) (Full name Hilda Doolittle; also wrote under the pseudonym John Helforth) American poet, novelist, playwright, translator, memoirist, and editor. Introduction Principal Works Prima... Read more

The American poet, translator, and novelist Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), generally called H. D., was an imagist whose lyric art conveys intense feelings through sharp images and "free" forms.Hilda Doo... Read more

H. D.'s life and work recapitulate the central themes of literary modernism: the emergence from Victorian norms and certainties, the entry into an age characterized by rapid technological change and t... Read more

Critical Essay by Harriet Monroe The amazing thing about H. D.'s poetry is the wildness of it—that trait strikes me as I read her whole record in the Collected Poems…. She is as ... Read more

Critical Essay by Bernard Duffey H. D.'s "memoir" of Ezra Pound [End to Torment] is somewhat mistitled since written late in her life, it is more an exploration of her feelings a... Read more

Critical Essay by Susan Stanford Friedman Hilda Doolittle's emergence on the pages of Poetry magazine in 1913 as "H. D., Imagiste" heralded the beginnings of a writer whose canon... Read more

Critical Essay by Albert Gelpi H. D. always wrote her own personal and psychological dilemma against and within the political turmoil of the twentieth century, the toils of love enmeshed in the convu... Read more

Critical Essay by Alison Tartt [The Gift, a] previously unpublished work, written in 1941 and 1943, re-creates fragments of H. D.'s childhood in Bethlehem and Upper Darby. Each chapter develop... Read more

Critical Essay by Lucy M. Freibert [The Gift] is a novelistic memoir of H. D.'s childhood. Like her epic trilogy, it issued from H. D.'s creative burst during the period of chaos (1941&... Read more

Critical Essay by David Daiches ["By Avon River"] has a charm and delicacy not often found among the tougher ironies of our modern poets and critics. It is in two parts: the first a ser... Read more

Critical Essay by Harry T. Moore ["Bid Me to Live"] evokes the England of the Imagists and of World War I, those times when, as she says, "Jocasta danced with Philoctetes."... Read more

Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner The poems in ["Hermetic Definition"] date from circa 1960, when [H. D.] was 74. She had been inserted into literary history at 26, when Ezra Pound invented... Read more

Critical Essay by Emily Stipes Watts Among Imagist poems, the verse of H. D. stands apart. Although she has been called "the perfect Imagist," she was never really an Imagist, as Pound ... Read more

Critical Essay by Vincent Quinn ["Hermetic Definition"] is an important revelation of [H. D.'s] understanding of the life of a poet. At the start of her career in 1913, by the ac... Read more

Critical Essay by Susan Gubar One of H. D.'s most coherent and ambitious poetic narratives, her war Trilogy, explores the reasons for her lifelong fascination with the palimpsest…. H. D... Read more