Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention. Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama. Reflecting the trauma she experienced in London during the Blitz, H.D.'s poetic style from World War II until her death pivoted towards complex long poems on esoteric and pacifist themes.
H.D. was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to wealthy and educated parents. Discovering her bisexuality, she had her first same-sex relationship while attending Bryn Mawr College between 1904 and 1906. After years of friendship, H.D. became engaged to Pound and followed him to London in 1911, where he championed her work. Their relationship soon fell apart, however, and H.D. instead married the Imagist poet Richard Aldington in 1913. In 1918, she met the novelist Bryher, who became her romantic partner and close friend until her death. An associate literary editor of the Egoist journal between 1916 and 1917, H.D. was published by The English Review and The Transatlantic Review. During World War I, both her brother and father died, and she separated from Aldington. She was treated by Sigmund Freud during the 1930s, as she sought to address and understand both her war trauma and bisexuality.
H.D. was keenly interested in Ancient Greek literature and published numerous Greek translations. Her poems routinely drew from Greek mythology and classical poets, from her earliest Imagist lyrics which depicted natural landscapes using Hellenistic motifs, to her 1950s long poem Helen in Egypt which reinterpreted the myth of the Trojan War. Raised Moravian by her family, and first introduced to occult and esoteric religious ideas by Pound in her youth, H.D. gradually developed a unique syncretic spiritual worldview. H.D.'s spiritual devotion intensified during and after World War II, and her syncretic ideas became the central focus of her later writing.
While H.D. wrote in a wide range of genres and modes over her career, during her lifetime she was known almost exclusively for her early Imagist poems. Following a reappraisal by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s, the significance of her late long poems and prose works was increasingly recognized, and she has come to be understood as a central figure in the history of modernist literature.
Hilda Doolittle was born on September 10, 1886, in the Moravian community of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her father, Charles, was professor of astronomy at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, and her mother, Helen (née Wolle), was a member of the Moravian brotherhood. Hilda had five brothers. When her father was appointed professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania to take charge of the Flower Observatory in Philadelphia, the family moved to Upper Darby.
She attended Friends' Central School in Philadelphia, and graduated in 1905. She delivered a commencement address, titled "The Poet's Influence". She enrolled at Bryn Mawr College in 1905 to study Greek literature, where she met the poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. After three terms of poor grades, H.D. withdrew from the college, and studied at home until 1910.
H.D. met poet Ezra Pound as a teenager in 1901. Pound became a lifelong friend and played a formative role in her development as a writer. In 1905, Pound and H.D. began an on-and-off relationship which included at least two engagements. Although his parents were in favor of the relationship, her parents strongly objected. In 1907, Pound gave her Hilda's Book, a handmade vellum binding of twenty-five of his earliest love poems, which he dedicated to her.
In 1910, Doolittle began a relationship with Frances Josepha Gregg, a young female art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Inspired by Gregg, H.D. wrote her first published poems, modeled after the work of Theocritus. Some of her early work, including some children's stories about astronomy, was published in New York newspapers and Presbyterian newsletters.
In May 1911, H.D. traveled to London on a vacation with Gregg and Gregg's mother; Gregg returned home, but H.D. stayed to develop a career as a writer. Pound introduced her to his friends, including English writer Brigit Patmore. Patmore introduced her to Richard Aldington, who became her husband in 1913. The three lived in Church Walk in Kensington; Pound resided at no. 10, Aldington at no. 8, and H.D. at no. 6, and they gathered to work daily in the British Museum Reading Room.
Pound began to meet with other poets in London to discuss ideas for reforming contemporary poetry. Like most modernists in different artistic fields, she sought to "make it new", which they accomplished by incorporating free verse, the brevity of the tanka and haiku forms, and the removal of unnecessary verbiage. Pound, H.D. and Aldington became known as the "three original Imagists" and published a three-point manifesto proclaiming the edicts of Imagism. According to Pound: We were agreed upon the three principles following:
Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to compose poetry in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
During a 1912 conversation with Pound, H.D. told him that she found "Hilda Doolittle" to be an old fashioned and "quaint" name; he suggested the signature H.D., an abbreviation she kept for the remainder of her career. After he "scrawled the name H.D. Imagiste" at the bottom of the page of her poem "Hermes of the Ways", she adopted H.D. as a pen. Privately he called her "Dryad".
In October 1912, under the rubric Imagiste, Pound submitted a selection of H.D.'s poems to Harriet Monroe, founder of the magazine Poetry, which was founded that year. In the January 1913 issue, three of her poems were published, "Hermes of the Ways", which Pound described as "this is poetry" after reading, "Priapus: Keeper of Orchards", later renamed "Orchard", and "Epigram". Three poems by Aldington were also published in the issue. These early poems are informed by her reading of Classical Greek literature, especially of Sappho, an interest she shared with Aldington and Pound. Her Imagist poetry is characterized by sparse language and a classical, austere purity, exemplified by one of her earliest and best-known poems, "Oread" (1915):
The style was not without its critics. In a dedicated Imagist issue of The Egoist magazine in May 1915, Harold Monro, an English poet, labeled H.D. the "truest Imagist" but dismissed her early work as "petty poetry", denoting "either poverty of imagination or needlessly excessive restraint". In contrast, a 1927 review by the British modernist author and critic May Sinclair described "Oread"'s brevity as a "miracle" and criticized Monro for not recognizing it.
In 1913, H.D. married Richard Aldington. The following year, Pound married the English artist Dorothy Shakespear. H.D. and Aldington's only child, a daughter, was stillborn in 1915. He enlisted in the British Army, and she took his place as assistant editor of The Egoist, serving for the next year. In 1916, H.D.'s first book, Sea Garden, was published. Meanwhile, H.D. and Aldington drifted apart; he reportedly took a mistress in 1917, and she started a close but platonic relationship with the English writer D. H. Lawrence.
In 1918, H.D.'s brother Gilbert was killed in action. She moved to Cornwall that March with the Scottish composer Cecil Gray, a friend of Lawrence. She became pregnant with Gray's child, but by the time she realized she was expecting, the relationship had cooled and Gray had returned to London. H.D. learned that her father died, having never recovered from Gilbert's death. Despondent and sick with the Spanish flu, she came close to death during the birth of their daughter Perdita Aldington in 1919.