H. D.

10 September 1886 - 27 September 1961

Standard Name: H. D.

Used Form: Hilda Doolittle

Birth Name: Hilda Doolittle

Married Name: Hilda Aldington

Self-constructed Name: H. D.

Pseudonym: John Helforth

Pseudonym: Edith Gray

Pseudonym: Helga Dorn

Pseudonym: J. Beran

Pseudonym: Rhoda Peter

Pseudonym: Helga Dart

Pseudonym: Delia Alton

Nickname: Dryad

Nickname: Dooley

Nickname: Astraea

HD, born American, who took British nationality after a marriage which lasted longer on paper than in practice, was a key figure in the international Imagist movement of the early twentieth century and in modernism more broadly: both through her own poetry and through her editing and dissemination of the work of others. As well as her imagistic pieces, she wrote complex longer poems (most published during her lifetime), translation, essays, reviews, outlines for films, and autobiographical novels which are, like most of her work, explorations of the self. Here she writes à clef of her own past, but also builds a web of mythical and psycho-analytical reference which makes her texts dense as well as rewarding. She is an explorer of the female psyche, and of the relation of gender to creativity and of myth to psychoanalysis.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort ascending	Author name	Excerpt
Wealth and Poverty	Bryher	Bryher soon provided Richardson (as she did H. D. ) with a trust fund that yielded £250 a year. Quartermain, Peter, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 45. Gale Research. 132
Travel	Bryher	In September 1920, Bryher's desire to meet American poets and see the liberating New World took her, H. D. , and H. D.'s daughter to the United States. Bryher met H. D.'s associate Marianne Moore
Travel	Bryher	Bryher and H. D. holidayed on the Isles of Scilly off Cornwall, where each came to a significant understanding about her respective writing. Quartermain, Peter, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 45. Gale Research. 128
Travel	Dorothy Richardson	Their trip was financed by Bryher , who also invited them to stay with her and H. D. at Bryher's villa on the shore of Lake Geneva for a month. Fromm, Gloria G. Dorothy Richardson: A Biography. University of Illinois Press. 157-8
Travel	Bryher	In the spring of 1920, Bryher and H. D. began an extended holiday in Greece and Crete. They were accompanied by sexologist Havelock Ellis , with whom they had first associated in 1918. Collecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910-1950. Cambridge University Press, http://Rutherford HSS. 67, 186, 283
Textual Production	Bryher	Desmond MacCarthy had launched Life and Letters in June 1928; it issued its last number this month, and Bryher's new publication first appeared in September. It merged it with the London Mercury after May 1939...
Textual Production	Anne Carson	AC 's The Albertine Workout was published as New Directions Poetry Pamphlet no. 13 (in a series whose no. 7 was H. D. 's Vale Ave). Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk. “Anne Carson”. New Directions.
Textual Production	Marianne Moore	In the early 1920s MM was already an influential New York reviewer, who covered such landmark texts as T. S. Eliot 's The Sacred Wood, 1921, Bryher 's first novel, Development, also in...
Textual Production	Edith Sitwell	John Lehmann and Derek Parker had published an earlier collection with the same title in 1970, but it was less valuable than it could have been because Edith's surviving brother, Sacheverell, decreed that all family...
Textual Production	T. S. Eliot	In June 1917 TSE took over the post of literary editor at The Egoist from his fellow American expatriate the poet and critic H. D. (though nominally from her then husband Richard Aldington , who...
Textual Production	Bryher	Bryher also wrote publicly on H. D. 's work. After H. D.'s 1921 collection Hymen was pronounced deadening and monotonous Collecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910-1950. Cambridge University Press, http://Rutherford HSS. 36 by the Times Literary Supplement, Bryher (who had helped publish the volume) praised...
Textual Production	Dorothy Richardson	Having begun writing poetry in mid-1923, Richardson was initially reluctant to share her poems with even her intimates: for instance with Bryher, who was a close friend and sometimes a creative confidante to H. D.
Textual Production	Dorothy Richardson	The volume contains a selection of Richardson's approximately 1,800 surviving letters, dated from 1901. It includes her personal and professional letters to such correspondents as Bryher , H. D. , Sylvia Beach , Amy Catherine (Jane)
Textual Production	Dora Marsden	Assistant editors were Richard Aldington and Leonard Compton-Rickett , and later H. D. (when Aldington went to war in June 1916) and T. S. Eliot (from July 1917). Contributors of creative work and critical reviews...
Textual Production	Bryher	As editors, Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson ensured Close Up's international, interdisciplinary emphases by publishing works by and on Sergei Eisenstein , G. W. Pabst , H. D. , Dorothy Richardson , Gertrude Stein , and Man Ray . Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History. University Press of Kentucky. 118-20

Timeline

July 1927

Close up. Devoted to the Art of Film began monthly publication in Territet near Montreux, Switzerland.

Early 1936

The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts (who was put forward for this task by T. S. Eliot ), set out to define the modern movement, not just chronologically but according...

Texts

H. D.,. Asphodel. Editor Spoo, Robert, Duke University Press, 1992.

H. D.,. Bid Me to Live. Grove, 1960.

H. D.,. By Avon River. Macmillan, 1949.

H. D., and Ezra Pound. End to Torment. Editors Pearson, Norman Holmes and Michael King, New Directions, 1979.

H. D.,. Hedylus. Basil Blackwell, 1928.

H. D.,. Helen in Egypt. Grove, 1961.

H. D.,. Heliodora, and Other Poems. Jonathan Cape, 1924.

H. D.,. Hermetic Definition. New Directions, 1972.

H. D.,. HERmione. New Directions, 1981.

H. D.,. Hymen. Egoist, 1921.

Aldington, Richard, and H. D. “Introduction and Commentary”. Richard Aldington and H.D.: The Early Years in Letters, edited by Caroline Zilboorg, Indiana University Press, 1992, p. Various pages.

Aldington, Richard, and H. D. “Introduction and Commentary”. Richard Aldington and H.D.: The Later Years in Letters, edited by Caroline Zilboorg, Manchester University Press, 1995, pp. 1 - 14; various pages.

H. D.,. Notes on Thought and Vision. City Lights Books, 1983.

H. D.,. Paint It Today. Editor Laity, Cassandra, New York University Press, 1992.

H. D.,. Palimpsest. Contact Editions, 1926.

H. D.,. “Review of The Farmer’s Bride by Charlotte Mew”. The Egoist, Vol.

, No. 9, p. 135.

H. D.,. Sea Garden. Constable, 1916.

H. D.,. The Flowering of the Rod. Oxford University Press, 1946.

H. D.,. The Gift. New Directions, 1982.

H. D.,. The Walls Do Not Fall. Oxford University Press, 1944.

H. D.,. Tribute To Freud. Pantheon, 1956.

H. D.,. Tribute to the Angels. Oxford University Press, 1945.