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. presents herself as an outsider who must express her views from a consciously female perspective, telling the truth, as [Emily] Dickinson would say, "slant." Inheriting uncomfortable male-defined images of women and of history, H. D. responds with palimpsestic or encoded revisions of male myths. Thus …, she discovers b...

Hilda Doolittle's emergence on the pages of Poetry magazine in 1913 as "H. D., Imagiste" heralded the beginnings of a writer whose canon spans half a century and the genres of poetry, fiction, memoir, essay, drama, and translation. This achievement was firmly rooted in H. D.'s central participation in the imagist movement, a short-lived moment in literary history, but one whose experiments changed the course of modern poetry with its concept of the "image" and its a...

In her life's work, H. D. returned constantly to a pattern of personal relations that she found perplexing and felt to be damaging to herself and other women: thralldom to males in romantic and spiritual love. In her later writing, she invented a number of strategies to transform this culturally mandated and seductive pattern of male-female relations. Romantic thralldom is a feature of many literary plots because of conventions surrounding love and marriage, quest and vocation, hero and heroine. Thes...

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 defined that term anyway. Although she is credited with being one of the formulators of the three Imagist principles, she was hardly any more a "follower" of them than Guiney, Cather, or Reese. (p. 152) If we examine the three original principles of Imagism as stated by F. S. Flint in the March 1913 issue of Poetry, we find that H. D....

["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 act of adopting the pen name "H. D.," she had separated her identity as Hilda Doolittle from her role as poet. In this poem, written almost fifty years later, she offered a "hermetic definition" of what that separation had meant…. The poem consists of three parts—"Red Rose and a Beggar," &#...

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 convulsions of war. Her marriage to and separation from Richard Aldington turn on World War I, and that concatenation of private and public trauma stands behind the poems of Sea Garden, which sum up the Imagist concision of her first phase. The sequences of Trilogy, written through the London blitzes of World War II, usher in the longer, multivale...

Perhaps this is a time not so much for an evaluation of H. D.'s art as it is an appropriate time to acquaint ourselves with just what H. D.'s art is. (p. 152) The most common adverse criticism of H. D.'s early poetry was that it made no social protest and that it was not journalism…. Keeping the elements of style for which she was praised early, H. D. has developed a poetic structure that is clearly unique and yet one could say that it is in the tradition of the best meditative l...

The publication of The Flowering of the Rod brings to a close H. D.'s war trilogy, which has received less attention than it merits. "War trilogy" … requires some qualification. It is true that the poem, which will be considered here in toto, begins amid the ruins of London, in the flaming terror of the Blitz, but it is equally true that it ends in an ox-stall in Bethlehem. The war was the occasion, it is not the subject-matter of the poem. Neither is "trilogy" whol...

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 wild as deer on the mountain, as hepaticas under the wet mulsh of spring, as a dryad racing nude through the wood…. She is, in a sense, one of the most civilized, most ultra-refined, of poets; and yet never was a poet more unaware of civilization, more independent of its thralls. She doesn't talk about nature, doesn't prais...

In her early poems H. D. expressed a particularly feminine viewpoint in relation to the poetic tradition. As time went on this stance became more and more clearly defined; today we would call it feminist. It is important to understand how H. D.'s particular poetic sensibility, which she expresses in a metaphorical or palimpsest way of thinking and writing, differs from the more masculine poetic thrust. What we must first come to understand in H. D.'s poetry is what we might call a figural or a...

While one might hesitate to classify Hilda Doolittle with the great poets, even though she is the best of the Imagists, one could hardly deny the radical transformation and new direction she has given to the genre by creating the neo-epic Helen in Egypt (1961), which explores the evolution of woman as person and as artist. The poem adheres to the epic conventions in that it is basically a quest which carries its protagonist into war, through the gates of ecstasy, into an underworld experience which includes...

Like so many others, I was for years familiar only with a handful of H. D.'s early poems, "Peartree," "Orchard," "Heat," "Oread." Beautiful though they were, they did not lead me to look further, at the time. Perhaps it was that being such absolutes of their kind they seemed final, the end of some road not mine; and I was looking for doors, ways in, tunnels through. When I came, late, to her later work, not searching but by inevitable chance, wh...

[HERmione] is remarkably engaging. Completed in 1927 at the height of the modernist period, the novel has a surprisingly contemporary ring. Its vitality, arising in part from H. D.'s experience, depends upon the bisexual nature of the relationships involved and the emergence of the protagonist as an artist. (pp. 93-4) [The] sensitive nature of the novel's content prevented its publication during the lifetime of the principals…. Though all of H. D.'s work contains deeply personal ...

The following notes on the poems of H. D. are written to pay tribute to an American poet whose writings have yet to receive full measure of critical attention in the United States…. Today, and in view of her later poems, it seems somewhat strange that most people still associate her writings only with the cause of "free verse" and "imagism," "the School of Images," that Ezra Pound in 1912 so cheerfully announced held the future "in their keeping....

[The essay from which this excerpt is taken originally appeared in College English, March 1975.] Why is [H. D.'s] poetry not read? H. D. is part of the same literary tradition that produced the mature work of the "established" artists—T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence…. Like these artists, H. D. began writing in the aestheticism and fascination for pure form characteristic of the imagists; and like them, she turned to epic form and to myth, r...

As the title suggests, HERmione is about a young woman divided against herself (Her and Hermione Gart are the same person) and against a certain perception of the world. Although this is the autobiographical narrative of a future poet, the handling of these divisions is unlike anything you will encounter in other portraits of young artists. An intensely personal narrative voice demands that you follow her on her terms and in her language only. The voice confides her universe of desire, drawn with emblems of...

["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." H. D.'s central character, Julia Ashton, is a poet whose marriage to another poet is disintegrating. Her husband Rafe, home on leave from the Western Front, becomes involved with a girl who lives in a room above the Ashtons' Bloomsbury flat: "I love you, I desire l'autre," Rafe tells Julia, who drifts into a...

[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 (1941–1943) following the Battle of Britain: The final chapter of The Gift, in fact, dramatizes Hilda's efforts, between air raids, to write the memoir. H. D. casts The Gift in a haunting, mystical, yet childlike, voice which matures as the memoir unfolds. She employs the mythical method throughout the work, overlaying fact with religious...

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 "Imagism" to supply a context for five poems of hers…. Unhappily the invented movement that was meant to float her reputation encapsulated it, and though she lived many more decades and extended her self-definition through many volumes, she has remained totally identified with the very little she had done when she was f...

["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 series of lyrics evoked by the contemplation of Shakespeare's "Tempest" and of certain aspects of his world and art and their sources in earlier currents of thought. These poems have a clear, yet slightly muted, tone, pleasing though occasionally slightly monotonous to the ear; they show a restrained, classical skill. The sec...

[Hedylus] is a poet's novel, rich in metaphor and meaning. Set in the classical world, the story explores the predicament of Hedylus, the young son of the beautiful Hedyle and, indeed, her mirror image; he is dazzled by her presence, yet longs to find his own identity. She stands for the intellect and Athens; he is for the imagination, Alexandria, India. The psychological tension between the pair can be resolved only by their separation, deathly though this will be to Hedyle. Inevitably, events are p...

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 about Pound, and about others, than a detailed recollection of the poet. Their relationship had originated in a youthful and ardently romanticized love affair during Pound's graduate year at the University of Pennsylvania, albeit one strictly supervised by H. D.'s father. By the time H. D. betook herself to London in 1911 the roman...

[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 develops a mosaic of incidents … associated in the author's remembrance by the logic of the subconscious. Combining symbols, images, remembered words and phrases, and bits of family history into patterns of highly rhythmic prose, H. D. evokes the impressionism of childhood and the amalgam of memory. The final chapter brings the reader ...

How to satisfy the needs of both woman and poet without betraying either is the major theme of [H. D.'s] work and must surely have been the cause of her breakdown as well. Over and over she expresses the struggle between her longing for love and her equally great desire for freedom and solitude. (p. 223) Margaret Newlin, "'Unhelpful Hymen!': Marianne Moore and Hilda Doolittle," in Essays in Criticism, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, July, 1977, pp. 216-30.∗