AboutHilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on September 10, 1886. She attended Bryn Mawr, as a classmate of Marianne Moore, and later the University of Pennsylvania where she befriended, and later fell deeply in love with, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Her work is characterized by the intense strength of her images, economy of language, and use of classical mythology. Her poems did not receive widespread appreciation during her lifetime, partly because of her involvement with the Imagist movement, even as her voice had outgrown the movement’s boundaries. H.D.’s life and work recapitulate the central themes of literary modernism: the emergence from Victorian norms and certainties, the entry into an age characterized by rapid technological change and the violence of two great wars, and the development of literary modes which reflected the disintegration of traditional symbolic systems and the mythmaking quest for new meanings. She is known primarily as a poet, but she also wrote novels, memoirs, and essays and did a number of translations from the Greek. Her work is consistently innovative and experimental, both reflecting and contributing to the avant-garde milieu that dominated the arts in London and Paris until the end of World War II. Immersed for decades in the intellectual crosscurrents of modernism, psychoanalysis, syncretist mythologies, and feminism, H.D. created a unique voice and vision that sought to bring meaning to the fragmented shards of a war-torn culture.
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...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?” |
Poetry:
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Modernism
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