- Born
- 10 September 1886Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA
- Died
- 27 September 1961Zurich, Switzerland · aged 75
H. D.
A modernist poet whose spare early images developed into expansive explorations of myth, war and desire.
Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1886. She briefly attended Bryn Mawr College before moving to London in 1911. Her early relationships included an engagement to Ezra Pound and a romance with Frances Gregg.
Pound helped introduce her poems under the signature “H. D., Imagiste”. Their concentrated images and engagement with ancient Greece made her an important voice in Imagism. She married the poet Richard Aldington in 1913, but the First World War brought bereavement and the breakdown of their marriage.
In 1918 she met Bryher, the writer born Annie Winifred Ellerman. Their relationship became a lasting source of emotional and financial support. Bryher also helped raise H. D.’s daughter Perdita, and their lives unfolded between Britain and Switzerland.
H. D.’s analysis with Sigmund Freud in 1933 and 1934 later informed “Tribute to Freud”. During the Second World War she wrote the poems of “Trilogy” in London, transforming the experience of destruction into an inquiry into memory and renewal. “Helen in Egypt”, a late reworking of Greek myth, appeared in 1961. She died in Zurich that year, aged 75.