Poet & Poetess BiographiesMaster Poets & Poetesses have bestowed upon us their poetic hues, graceful talents and prolific writings. You will find their biographies and sample writings here.
H. D. (World-Traveled Imagist & Feminist Poet 1886 - 1961)
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H. D. (World-Traveled Imagist & Feminist Poet 1886 - 1961)
H. D. [Hilda Doolittle] (1886-1961)
In a career that spanned five decades, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) was given many labels: Imagist, feminist, mythologist, and mystic amongst others. Her abiding concern, though, was to explore and represent her personal experience as a poet and a woman. So although she is best known for her association with the key early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, her later writing represents a move away from the Imagist model, towards a distinctly feminine version of modernist poetry and prose.
She attended Bryn Mawr, as a classmate of Marianne Moore, and later the University of Pennsylvania where she befriended Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. She travelled to Europe in 1911, intending to spend only a summer, but remained abroad for the rest of her life. During a meeting with her in the British Museum tea room in 1912, Pound (her short-lived former fiance) appended the signature H.D. Imagiste to her poetry, creating the label that was to stick to the poet for most of her writing life. Up until the end of the 1930's H.D.'s poetry was written in an Imagist mode with a spare use of language, a rhetorical structure based on analogy rather than simile, metaphor or symbolism and a classical purity of surface that can often mask an underlying dramatic energy.
In 1960, H.D. was in the United States to collect the American Academy of Arts and Letters medal. Returning to Switzerland, she suffered a stroke in July of 1961 and died a couple of months later in Zürich. Her epitaph consists of the following lines from an early poem:
So you may say,
Greek flower; Greek ecstasy
reclaims forever
one who died
following intricate song's
lost measure.
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