A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z


Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), (1886-1961)

LINKS

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hd/hd.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Hilda Doolittle.

BIOGRAPHY

A pioneering figure in feminist poetics, Hilda Doolittle was raised in Upper Darby, a Philadelphia suburb near the University of Pennsylvania, where her father Charles Doolittle, an astronomer, directed the Flower Observatory. Hilda Doolittle was encouraged in her creative and artistic pursuits by her mother Hellen (Wolle) who was a musician. An early influence on her poetry and identity was the modernist poet Ezra Pound, to whom she was twice engaged. Her attachment to Pound was complicated by her attraction to Frances Josepha Gregg, a student enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Throughout her life, Doolittle would pursue a bisexual lifestyle beginning with her lifelong relationship to the shipping heiress Winifred Ellerman, who called herself Bryher. Following the failure of Doolittle's marriage to Richard Aldington, and affairs with British author D. H. Lawrence and the painter Cecil Grey (the father of Doolittle's daughter Perdita), Doolittle had a close relationship to Bryher that lasted until the poet's death in 1961. In fact, her connection to Bryher persisted through Bryher's marriages to the author Robert McAlmon and the filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson, who was also Doolittle's lover. She received her nom du plume from Ezra Pound who in 1913 sent her poems to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry Magazine, adding the signature "H.D., Imagiste." H.D. became forever identified thereafter with the Imagist Movement that stressed a concise, straightforward, and direct "treatment of the thing" at hand. Such an imagist style characterized H.D.'s first collection of verse Sea Garden (1916). H.D., increasingly however, in such mature works as Trilogy (1946), Helen in Egypt (1961), and Hermetic Definition (1972), she devoted herself to developing an modernist "women's mythology": one that, in its epic scope, revisited and rewrote classical Greek myth. H.D.'s interest in Greek literature extended to the several translations she undertook of Sappho, Meleager, and Euripides, among others. H.D. also wrote an important and provocative memoir of her time as an analysand with Sigmund Freud, entitled Tribute to Freud (written in 1944 and published between 1945-1985). Other prose works include End to Torment (1979) and The Gift (1982), as well as Pilate's Wife, Asphodel, and Her collected in Hermione (1981).

SECONDARY SOURCES

Bloom, Harold, Ed. H.D. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989.

Boughn, Michael. H.D.: A Bibliography, 1905-1990. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia: 1993.

Collecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910-1950. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Friedman, Susan Stanford and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Eds. Signets: Reading H.D. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Gregory, Eileen. H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

King, Michael John, Ed. H.D. Woman and Poet. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1986.

Taylor, Georgina. H. D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers 1913-46: Talking Women. New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2001.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER