its Victorian past. Her “Grecianness” was not, however, merely a myth woven about H. D. within her circle of friends; it was a serious (if not utterly scholarly) pursuit.

After H. D.’s marriage in 1913 to Richard Aldington, the couple spent time in Paris, where they met Henry Slominsky, a young philosopher who had recently published Heraclit und Parmenides, and spent many evenings with him (“noctes Atticae,” Aldington called them) discussing Homer and Aeschylus, Pythagoras and Plato. In the Diocletian Gallery in Rome, H. D. discovered a little statue of the Hermaphrodite, which she would visit each time she returned to the eternal city; and on a short visit to Capri—her first true taste of the Grecian world—she believed she saw the god Pan.

The result of this immersion in the Greek spirit was the invention or discovery of a peculiarly modern and personal mythic Greece that was to dominate her poems. More directly, she began work on translating some choruses from Iphigenia in Aulis. Her Greek was not scholarly: She once commented to a friend on the word “freesia,” saying it was an example of a beautiful Greek word, only to be told the flower had been named for F. H. T. Freese. Douglas Bush claims that her “self-conscious, even agonized, pursuit of elusive beauty is quite un-Greek.”

If H. D. indulged at times in false etymologies, that has always been the prerogative of a poet, and T. S. Eliot was to say of her translations of Euripides that they were, “allowing for errors and even occasional omissions of difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and English” than those of Gilbert Murray, the dean of Greek translators. Writing of her poem “Hermes of the Ways,” Hugh Kenner would capture to a nicety the curiously Greek yet un-Greek, ancient yet modern tone of so much of H. D.’s work: “We do not mistake the poem for the imagined utterance of some Greek, nor do we hear a modern saying ‘I feel as if. . . .’ ”

Within her Greek matrix, H. D. presented her own struggles and betrayals, her own erotic ambiguities and creative anxieties. H. D. published Sea Garden, her first book of verse, and Choruses from the Iphigenia in Aulis in 1916: Her early collections all contain translations from—and works inspired by—Sappho, Meleager, and Euripides. Hymen (1921), Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), and Red Roses for Bronze (1929) followed.

H. D. lived in England through World War I. Her marriage to Aldington was virtually over by 1917. In 1918, she met Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), who was to be her lifelong companion, she had a daughter, Perdita, by Cecil Gray, in 1919. Meanwhile, and she had appeared in numerous Imagist anthologies, had formed friendships with D. H. Lawrence and other creative artists, and had traveled in Greece and Egypt. Collected Poems of H. D. was published in 1925.

During the 1920’s, H. D. began to write prose fiction. Palimpsest (1926) is set in classical Rome, London between the wars, and the Egypt of the archaeologists. Hedylus (set in ancient Alexandria) followed in 1928. She also wrote several works with specifically lesbian content, which were not published during her lifetime: Pilate’s Wife, Asphodel, and Her (published as Hermione in 1981).

In 1933, H. D. went into analysis with Sigmund Freud. If her poetry was of the realm of the gods, dryads, and maenads of Greek myth, his technique of psychoanalysis was no less rooted in Greek mythology—the myth of Oedipus—in language, and in a notion of self-uncovering for which he himself used the metaphor of archaeology. Indeed, H. D.’s title Palimpsest could also stand as metaphor for Freud’s sense that there are layers upon layers of meaning within human consciousness, inscribed upon one another in the same way that writing is layered upon writing in a palimpsest.

“I am on the fringes or in the penumbra of the light of my father’s science and my mother’s art—the psychology or philosophy of Sigmund Freud,” H. D. would write later. Freud told her she was a perfect example of the bisexual and that she had “two things to hide, one that you were a girl, the other that you were a boy.”

Freud and H. D. were in some ways perfectly matched: It is no surprise that her first account of her analysis, Tribute to Freud (1956), was described by Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones as “surely the most delightful and precious appreciation of Freud’s personality that is ever likely to be written.” An expanded version was published in 1974.

After her Freudian analysis, World War II was the next major influence on H. D.’s writing—it was also the only time that H. D. and Bryher lived together for an extended period—the two strands coming together in her long poetic sequence Trilogy (published posthumously in one volume in 1973), comprising The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946).

The poems of The Walls Do Not Fall are remarkable, written in a time of bombs falling, magnesium flares, houses torn open: “there is zrr-hiss,/ lightning in a not-known,// unregistered dimension;/ we are powerless,// dust and powder fill our lungs/ our bodies blunder// through doors twisted on hinges. . . .” Like the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot (“The dove descending breaks the air/ With flame of incandescent terror”), these poems of war carry war into apocalypse. It is the spiritual dimensions, the possibility that H. D. calls “spiritual realism,” in which the ancient past merges with the present, that H. D. is after: “possibly we will reach haven,/ heaven.” No less remarkable are the poems that make up Tribute to the Angels, which H. D. herself called a “premature peace poem.”

In December, 1946, aged sixty, H. D. moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, and what was arguably the most fertile period of her life began, in which she published By Avon River (1949), a tribute to Shakespeare; Bid Me to Live (1960), a novel; Helen in Egypt (1961), a poem about Helen of Troy; and End to Torment (1979), a memoir of her long friendship with Ezra Pound.

H. D. died in Zurich on September 27, 1961, having become the first woman to receive the Award of Merit Medal for Poetry of the American Academy of Arts and Letters the year before.

H. D. summed up her life and writings, from “Hermes of the Ways” to her final poetic sequence, in this taut phrase: “H. D.—Hermes—hermeticism and all the rest of it.” Hermetic Definition (1972), her final sequence of poems, was published posthumously.

Summary

Long thought of as Pound’s protégé or as the quintessential early Imagist—and thus a minor figure of note in a largely male poetic history—H. D. can be seen as more in the light of a feminist rewriting of critical history. Imagism itself becomes the cult of H. D., and modern poetics begins with her at least as much as with Pound.

In addition, she brings (as does her friend and colleague Marianne Moore) a uniquely feminine vision to her poetry. Judy Grahn is among those poets who have followed H. D. in the exploration of feminine myth, in such works as The Queen of Wands (1982) and The Queen of Swords (1987).

Writing in 1993 of Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and H. D., Margaret Dickie noted, “Because they were considered marginal figures even by their friends among the male Modernists, these women were free to experiment long after their male contemporaries were moved to consolidate and conserve. . . . They have waited almost a century for the readers that they have today because they were at least that far ahead of their times.”

Bibliography

Camboni, Marina, ed. H. D.’s Poetry: “The Meanings that Words Hide: Essays.” Brooklyn, N.Y.: AMS, 2003. This collection examines topics such as, the gender issues in H. D.’s Trilogy, H. D.’s uses of language, and the poet’s influence on other poets.

Dickie, Margaret. “Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernism.” In The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. A sensitive essay offering an extended treatment of H. D., Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein.

Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. An excellent biography of H. D., tracing the many strands that, woven together, constitute the complex life of a woman whose work was always autobiographical, always rooted in the concrete event as it flowered in symbolic and mythic thought. A bibliography and an index are included.

H. D. Tribute to Freud. Boston: David R. Godine, 1974. H. D.’s own account of her psychoanalysis with Freud, which provides an entrance into the understanding of her life and mode of work, besides being a fascinating account of both Freud and psychoanalysis. Widely recommended as the first book of H. D.’s to read. An appendix of letters from Freud to H. D. is included.

Korg, Jacob. Winter Love: Ezra Pound and H. D. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. An examination of the personal and professional relationship between two of the most significant poets of the twentieth century. This book is especially worthwhile for those beginning study on H. D.

Robinson, Janice S. H. D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Another excellent biography of H. D. Includes notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Stock, Noel. The Life of Ezra Pound. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970. A biography of the poet who was H. D.’s first love and mentor in poetry, and from whose shadow she has only recently begun to emerge. Provides essential background on Imagism and early modernism. Index.