Who Buried H. D.? A Poet, Her Critics, and Her Place in "The Literary Tradition"

Abstract

is A MAJOR TWENTIETH-CENTURY POET who all too often receives the response H.D.?-who's he? When people are reminded that H.D. was the pen name for Hilda Doolittle, it is generally remembered that she was one of those imagist poets back in the beginning of the century who changed the course of modern poetry with their development of the image and free verse. Her early poems, like Oread or Heat, still appear regularly in modern poetry anthologies, but the more difficult epic poetry she went on to write is seldom studied or taught. The canon of her major, largely unread work is considerable: The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946) are the three long poems of her war Trilogy, which has recently been reissued; Helen in Egypt (1961) is the work she called her own Cantos; the newly published volume Hermetic Definition (1972) contains three more long poems, the title poem, Winter Love, and Sagesse; and Vale Ave is another, as-yet-unpublished epic poem. While poetry was undoubtedly the genre giving fullest expression to her creative energies, she also published numerous translations, acted in a movie whose script she wrote (Borderline, with Paul Robeson, 1930), experimented with drama (Hippolytus Temporizes, 1927), and wrote several novels (Hedylus, 1928; Palimpsest, 1926; Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal), 1960; and the largely unpublished The Gift), interesting at the very least for her own style of rendering stream of consciousness. Her memoir of Freud, Tribute to Freud (1956), is both an impressionistic record of their sessions together and a serious reevaluation of his impact on the twentieth century; it too has been recently reissued in expanded form. Caged in a literary movement that lasted all of six or seven years, the magnificent poet of these epics and the writer who experimented in a wide variety of genres is like the captured white-faced Scops owl in her poem Sagesse. While the onlookers at the zoo chatter about his comical whiskers and