Why Everyone Fell in Love with H.D.

The story of how Hilda Doolittle became H.D. is the story of how a woman becomes a myth — which is both a kind of elevation and a kind of erasure. In 1912, at a tearoom in the British Museum, Ezra Pound took the manuscript of three short poems she had written, signed them "H.D., Imagiste" in pencil, and sent them to Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine. The poems were published. They were admired. And for the next several decades, H.D. — the initials, the anonymity, the almost mineral hardness of that signature — was often the most interesting thing critics thought they knew about her. She was an Imagist. She was Pound's discovery. She was the pure vessel of a movement. She was not, somehow, quite a person.

The signature and what it hid

She died in 1961. By then her reputation had already contracted to something smaller than her actual body of work, and it contracted further in the years after her death. The longer, more visionary poems she had written across the middle decades of her life — the war trilogy simply titled Trilogy, the book-length Helen in Egypt, the late spiritual meditations — were largely unread, outpaced by the shorter early lyrics that had defined the Imagist moment. She was a founding figure who had somehow been left standing at the founding.

And then, in the 1970s and 1980s, feminist literary scholars began to read her again. What they found astonished them. And the falling in love — wide, collective, unstoppable — began.

What she invented

The Imagist movement, in which H.D. was not merely a participant but a defining presence, changed English-language poetry in ways that are still working themselves out. The principles were simple, almost bluntly so: use the exact word, not the nearly exact word; avoid abstractions; present the image directly, without ornament; write in the rhythm of the musical phrase, not the metronome. These were principles aimed at clearing the Victorian undergrowth, at scraping the accumulated sentiment and decoration from a poetry that had grown heavy with both. What Pound and the other Imagists recognised — and what H.D. embodied more purely than almost anyone — was that the image itself, the thing seen and precisely rendered, could carry more emotional weight than any amount of direct statement.

Her early poem "Oread" is one of the most startling short poems in English. It is nine lines. It addresses the sea as though the speaker is part of it: the mountain nymph calls the waves to hurl themselves into the pine trees, fir trees, pools of fir. The boundary between sea and forest, between the moving and the rooted, dissolves:

The poem does this in forty-three words. There is no metaphor declared, no comparison made explicit; the likeness is enacted, embodied in the sound and motion of the lines. This is what the best Imagism does, and H.D. did it more consistently than any of her contemporaries, including Pound himself, who was too interested in argument to sustain the discipline for long.

But reducing H.D. to Imagism is the error that delayed her full recognition for decades. The early lyrics — brilliant as they are — represent a fraction of what she actually wrote. Trilogy, composed during and immediately after the Second World War while she was living through the London Blitz, is a poem of vision and survival and mystical intensity that belongs in a different category altogether from "Oread." Helen in Egypt, her late masterwork, is a meditation on myth, war, feminine consciousness, and the multiple unstable nature of identity that runs to over three hundred pages and still resists final summary. The woman who wrote those books was not the decorative Imagist of the anthologies. She was something far stranger and more formidable.

The life that would not stay behind the work

Part of what makes H.D. so compelling — and part of what the feminist scholars of the 1970s immediately grasped — is that her life and her work are not separable in the way that, say, Yeats's life and work are separable. You can read Yeats at considerable depth without knowing much about Maud Gonne. With H.D., the biographical intensity enters the poems not as gossip but as structure. Her relationships — with Pound, to whom she was briefly engaged; with the writer Richard Aldington, whom she married; with the novelist Bryher, with whom she spent the most settled decades of her life; with D.H. Lawrence; with Sigmund Freud, who analysed her in the 1930s and became, improbably, a friend — all of this is not background. It is material, transformed but recognisable, present in the recurring mythological figures, the persistent return to Eros and Psyche, to Helen and Achilles, to the feminine divine.

Her eroticism is one of the things people fall in love with, and it is worth being precise about what that eroticism is. It is not confessional in the manner of Anne Sexton or Sharon Olds — it does not announce itself, does not perform its own explicitness. It works through the mythological, through the image, through a quality of charged attention that is the erotic mode of Sappho, whom H.D. translated and deeply loved. When she writes about the sea, the sea is erotic. When she writes about flowers — the white narcissus, the rose cut from its stem — the flowers are erotic. The criticism that has tried to explain this as mere symbolism misses the point. H.D.'s eroticism is not symbolic. It is the texture of her attention itself, the way desire and perception cannot be fully separated in her work because they were not separated in her experience.

She was also — and this mattered enormously to the readers who rediscovered her — a woman writing about desire for both men and women at a time when such writing was not safe. Her sexuality was known to her intimates and encoded in her work but not publicly declared. Bryher (born Winifred Ellerman, one of the wealthiest women in England) was her companion and protector for decades. Their relationship, and its significance to H.D.'s survival as a writer, is woven into her late work in ways that become visible once you know to look. When lesbian and feminist critics began to look, they found a rich and largely uncharted territory — a major poet who had been writing about female experience, female desire, and female spiritual authority with extraordinary sophistication for fifty years.

The visionary turn

What the rediscovery most fully restored was the H.D. of the later work — the mystic, the visionary, the poet who passed through psychoanalysis and came out the other side with a deepened commitment to the idea that poetry was a form of seeing beyond the visible. Trilogy, which takes its form loosely from three cities of wartime — London, Oxford, and the mythological Bethlehem — is a poem about survival through attention to the sacred. This passage from the opening section, "The Walls Do Not Fall," gives a sense of its voice and its stakes:

Written in short, numbered sections with the compressed clarity of her Imagist beginnings but now in service of a much larger argument, it returns again and again to the image of the flowering rod, the resurrection of the feminine divine, the possibility that beauty attended to carefully enough is a form of spiritual resistance.

This is not easy poetry. It demands a reader willing to move between the classical tradition, the Christian mystical tradition, Egyptian mythology, and the felt concrete reality of bombs falling on a city — sometimes within a few stanzas. But the readers who have loved it most deeply have found in this very difficulty something essential: the sense that H.D. was not simplifying the complexity of experience into manageable form, but holding it in its full intractability and finding, through the act of writing, a way to go on.

Helen in Egypt is still more demanding and still more rewarding. It follows the myth that holds Helen never went to Troy at all, that a phantom went in her place while the real Helen waited in Egypt — but what interests H.D. is less the narrative than the question of identity it raises. If a phantom can be indistinguishable from the original, what is the original? What is the self that persists through desire and war and time? The poem's Helen is not the flat temptress of the conventional myth but a consciousness in the process of understanding itself, revisiting the figures of its past — Achilles, Paris, Theseus — and finding in each encounter a new version of who she is. It is one of the great meditations on feminine subjectivity in the English language, and for forty years almost no one read it.

The falling in love

So why does everyone fall in love with H.D.? The answer is something like: because she does not condescend. She does not offer the reader comfort at the price of truth. She writes from inside an experience of desire, loss, mystical perception, and historical catastrophe without softening any of it, and she trusts the reader to follow her into the difficulty. The falling in love, when it happens, is the recognition of being trusted.

There is also the matter of her voice, which is unlike anyone else's. Hard and luminous at once — the quality of marble in sunlight, or water over stone. She is not warm in the way that makes some poets immediately accessible. She is something better: precise. And precision, in poetry, is its own form of intimacy. To be described exactly — to see the world rendered with that accuracy — is to feel known. H.D. makes you feel known by the images she chooses, by the weight she gives to things.

She was overlooked because the century read her wrong, through the narrow frame of Imagism, through the biographical noise of Pound's influence, through the general difficulty that literary culture has historically had in reading women as whole and complex writers rather than satellites to the male careers that surrounded them. The rediscovery was simply the correction of that error. And what the correction revealed — a body of work that spans the lyric and the epic, the erotic and the visionary, the personal and the mythological — turned out to be enormous.

That is why everyone falls in love with H.D. She was always this large. It just took a while to see it.

About the author

G. K. Allum

Founding Editor & President, Ink & Ribbon Press · MFA student, Pacific University

G. K. Allum is the founding editor of Ink & Ribbon Press, a nonprofit poetry publisher on Bainbridge Island, Washington. He is completing an MFA in poetry at Pacific University.