H.D. and the Film Arts

Abstract

Literary history perceives Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) primarily as a poet and novelist. But this view is somewhat incomplete, for her creative activities ranged further than this. From 1927 to 1930, H.D. was devoting much of her energy to film-criticizing, acting in, and writing poems about this twentieth-century art form. Moreover, for H.D. this work in film seemed to serve as a catalyst for an aesthetic theory that referred not only to film, but could, at the same time, encompass the various art forms in which she participated. H.D. is most often recognized as the Ezra-Pound-discovered originator of the short-lived (c. 1910-1917) but influential force in modern poetry called Imagism. After this Imagist period, especially after the publication of Collected Poems in 1925, H.D. departed from the tenets of Imagism. Her switch from Imagist verse begins most clearly with the two novels she wrote in the mid-1920s, Palimpsest (1926) and Hedylus (1928). But her poetry also changed. During and after World War II she wrote three booklength meditative poems-The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). After this period she wrote several works of nonfiction prose, the most well-known of which is probably her Tribute to Freud (1956). However, although H.D. continued to write for another forty-five years, it is the pre-1925 body of material that traditionally has received the bulk of critical attention. More recently this trend has shifted. Some of H.D.'s later novels and poems have attracted sufficient attention to warrant republication, along with an increasing amount of new biographical and critical commentary.' An important gap remains, however, for the critical writing has passed over H.D.'s vigorous and polemical participation in the rising film art.