Hilda Doolittle – Interesting Literature

Helen in Egypt: H. D.’s Modernist Epic

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle visits Egypt courtesy of H. D.’s response to the epic poem

Helen of Troy was a mere phantom conjured by the goddess Hera. The real wife of Menelaus, the woman we know as ‘Helen of Troy’, spent the duration of the Trojan War in Egypt, having been taken there by Hermes and kept out of harm’s way, while some pretender was used back in Troy as a stand-in for the real Helen. The Greeks and the Trojans both went to war over what was, effectively, an illusion.

‘The Walls Do Not Fall’: H. D.’s Trilogy, Modernism, and War

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads a wide-ranging poem about the Second World War

When H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and her then-husband Richard Aldington walked into a bomb-damaged house during the First World War, Aldington found an abandoned volume of Robert Browning’s poetry and kicked it across the room. What use was poetry in the face of such destruction? But poetry tends to endure in wartime: T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets would largely be written during the next world war, while H. D.’s own poetry would have a curious and poignant afterlife: sections of her poem ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’ (from her long poem Trilogy) were inscribed by an anonymous graffitist among the ruins of the World Trade Center after 9/11.

As Norman Holmes Pearson notes in his introduction to the Carcanet edition of Trilogy which I own, with this long poem – or trilogy of long poems – H. D. was trying to connect the communal experience of the Second World War with her own history and with history in general.

The Best Poems by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Hilda Doolittle, or H. D. as she chose to publish, was labelled ‘the perfect imagist’ by various critics and reviewers. The following five poems show why H. D. was the leading light of the short-lived imagist movement, as her poetry offers concise and vivid images behind which lurk whole storms of restrained emotion. Here’s a selection of H. D.’s finest poems, both from her imagist period and from her later work.

A Short Analysis of Hilda Doolittle’s ‘Oread’

A reading of a classic Imagist poem

Along with Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’, the short poem ‘Oread’ by Hilda Doolittle or H. D. (1886-1961) may be the defining poem of the Imagist movement. You can read ‘Oread’ here, before proceeding to our analysis of the poem below.

‘Oread’ was published in the 1915 anthology Some Imagist Poets, which also featured poems by Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and F. S. Flint – probably the main poets who published under the Imagist banner.

A Short Analysis of Hilda Doolittle’s ‘The Pool’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Pool’ is, along with ‘Oread’, Hilda Doolittle’s finest achievement as an Imagist poet. The poem was first published in the 1915 anthology Some Imagist Poets. You can read ‘The Pool’ here (all five lines of it), before proceeding to our analysis of this curious little poem.