A critic, novelist, translator, mystic, and poet, Hilda Doolittle, familiarly known by the pen name H. D., overthrew traditional male domination of myth to voice the female perspective. She produced the “signet,” her term for an evocative, many-layered verse that influenced a generation of writers, including Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov. At heart a flamboyant narcissist, rambler, friend-maker, and creator, she toured much of the world and more of the self. The poems that record her search of the self epitomize imagism, the tight, precise construction of verse that calls up multiple meanings and implications through sound, rhythm, word etymology, and free-form syntax.
H. D. was born on September 10, 1886, in Bethlehem, a Moravian community in Pennsylvania. Her family moved to Philadelphia in 1895, when her father took charge of the Flower Observatory of the University of Pennsylvania. After excelling at classical and modern foreign language at Miss Gordon’s School and the Friends’ Central School in Philadelphia, she studied astronomy at Bryn Mawr for three semesters, from 1904 to 1906, before quitting. A three-sided romantic fling with poets Ezra Pound and Josepha Frances Gregg and the draw of London’s literary circles superceded her interest in formal education. Her parents despaired of H. D.’s rebellion against home, school, and society, but allowed her to sail to Europe with the Greggs.
Before Ezra Pound introduced her to free verse, H. D. published children’s stories in a Presbyterian magazine. At age 25, she resettled in London, cultivated literary friendships, and traveled before entering a twenty-three-year marriage to imagist poet and biographer Richard Aldington, editor of the Egoist, in October 1913. The couple collaborated on translations of Greek lyric verse until his departure with the British Army for France.
In 1913, Pound fostered H. D.’s career by issuing her verse in Poetry Magazine, under the pseudonym “H. D., Imagiste,” and exhibiting her work in his anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). On her own, H. D. published Sea Garden (1916). When her husband went to war, she joined T. S. Eliot in editing the Egoist. The post–World War I period tried her stamina with grief over her brother Gilbert’s death in combat, a miscarriage, her father’s death, an affair with music critic Cecil Grey, and, in 1919, the painful birth of their daughter, Frances Perdita. About the time H. D. ended her marriage, she met a wealthy traveling companion, Annie Winnifred Ellerman, who named herself Bryher after one of the Scilly Islands. In 1920, H. D. and Bryher moved to Lake Geneva, which remained their home.
Mature verse colors H. D.’s collections: the life-affirming meditations in Hymen (1921), Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), and Collected Poems of H. D. (1925), the beginning of the poet’s critical and popular success and literary independence. Subsequent publications display self-confidence and growing feminism: an experimental autobiography, HERmione (1927), a verse tragedy dramatically entitled Hippolytus Temporizes: A Play in Three Acts (1927), Red Roses for Bronze (1932), and a translation of Euripides’s tragedy Ion (1937). Following Collected Poems (1940), she issued a pro-matriarchal trilogy—The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and Flowering of the Rod (1946)—and her last verse collection, Helen in Egypt (1961), an examination of necromancy through blended prose and epic poetry.
In addition to submissions to Life and Letters Today, H. D. flourished in long fiction, including an experimental three-part novel entitled Palimpsest (1926), the psycho-biographical comedy Hedylus (1928), The Hedgehog (1936), the Elizabethan-style By Avon River (1949), and Bid Me to Live (1960), which recaps her relationship with D. H. Lawrence and Aldington. Her tenuous mental state, worsened by her ambivalence toward bisexualism, required additional fine-tuning and shock therapy. In token of her treatment by the Viennese psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud in 1933–1934, a collection of personal essays, Tribute to Freud (1954), explored occultism and Freudian analysis.
H. D. was more content in her last years following treatment for nervous exhaustion, and she maintained a satisfying relationship with Bryher. Later, she was paralyzed and aphasic for three months from a paralytic stroke and died on September 27, 1961, at the Klinik Hirslanden in Zurich. To the end, Bryher supervised her care. The poet’s ashes repose under a simple, flat gravestone among the Doolittles at Nisky Hill Cemetery in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
H. D.’s influence extends to both sides of the Atlantic. She was the first female poet to earn the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal. The subjects of three posthumous titles—the power of feminine love in Hermetic Definition (1972), her ambivalence toward D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound in End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound by H. D. (1979), and The Gift (1969), a collection of Freudian self-analysis and remembrances of her grandmother—have deepened understanding of H. D.’s place in modern poetry. A more detailed work, Notes on Thought and Vision (1982), is an articulate statement of her aesthetic credo.
