Actors - H.D.

	Actors - H.D.

Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania – September 27, 1961, Zürich), prominently known only by her initials H.D., was an American poet, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her association with the key early 20th-century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, although her later writing represents a move away from the Imagist model and towards a distinctly feminine version of modernist poetry and prose.

Doolittle was one of the leading figures in the bohemian culture of London in the early decades of the century. Her work is noted for its use of classical models and its exploration of the conflict between lesbian and heterosexual attraction and love that closely resembled her own life. Her later poetry also explores traditional epic themes, such as violence and war, from a feminist perspective. H.D. was the first woman to be granted the American Academy of Arts and Letters medal.

Early life and work

Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Her father, Charles Doolittle, was professor of astronomy at Lehigh University and her mother, Helen (Wolle), was a Moravian with a strong interest in music. In 1895, Charles Doolittle was appointed Flower Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and the family moved to a house in Upper Darby, an affluent Philadelphia suburb.

Doolittle attended Philadelphia's (Society of) Friends Central High School, located at Fifteenth and Race streets, graduating in 1903. A year earlier, she met and befriended Ezra Pound, who was to play a major role both in her private life and her emergence as a writer. In 1905, he presented her with a sheaf of love poems with the collective title Hilda's Book.

That same year, Doolittle attended Bryn Mawr College to study Greek literature, but she left after three terms because of bad grades and poor health. While at the college, she met the poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Her first published writings, some stories for children, were published in a local church paper between 1909 and 1913, mostly under the name Edith Gray. In 1907, she became engaged to Pound. Her father disapproved of Pound, and by the time her father left for Europe in 1908, the engagement had been called off. Around this time, Doolittle entered into a relationship with a young art student named Frances Josepha Gregg. After spending part of 1910 living in New York City's Greenwich Village, she sailed to Europe with Gregg and Gregg's mother in 1911.

H.D. Imagiste

Pound had already moved to London, where he had started meeting with other poets at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho to discuss plans to reform contemporary poetry through free verse, the tanka and haiku, and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage from poems. Soon after H.D. arrived in England, she showed Pound some poems she had written. He was impressed by their closeness to the ideas he had been discussing and introduced her and another poet, Richard Aldington, to the group.

In 1912, during a meeting with H.D. in the British Museum tea room, Pound appended the signature H.D. Imagiste to her poetry, creating a label that was to stick to the poet for most of her writing life. That same year, Harriet Monroe started her Poetry magazine and asked Pound to act as foreign editor. In October, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the rubric Imagiste. Aldington's poems were in the November issue of Poetry and H.D.'s poems, "Hermes of the Ways," "Orchard," and "Epigram", in the January 1913 issue. Imagism as a movement was launched with H.D. as its prime exponent.

Although the early models for the imagist group were Japanese, H.D. derived her way of making poems from her reading of Classical Greek literature and especially the recently rediscovered works of Sappho, an interest she shared with Aldington and Pound, each of whom produced versions of the Greek poet's work. In 1915, H.D. and Aldington launched the Poets' Translation Series, pamphlets of translations from lesser-known Greek and Latin classics. In total, H.D. published three volumes of translations from the Greek: Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis (1916), Choruses from the Iphigenia in Aulis and the Hippolytus of Euripides (1919) and Euripides' Ion (1937), and an original play based on Greek models called Hippolytus Temporizes (1927). H.D. continued her association with the group until the final issue of the Some Imagist Poets anthology in 1917. She and Aldington did most of the editorial work on the 1915 anthology. Her work also appeared in Aldington's Imagist Anthology 1930. All of her poetry up to the end of the 1930s 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. This style of writing was not without its critics. In a special Imagist issue of The Egoist magazine in May 1915, the poet and critic Harold Monro called H.D.'s early work "petty poetry", denoting "either poverty of imagination or needlessly excessive restraint".

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