25 July 2022 – Hilda Doolittle - Womankind in the 19th Century Living in the 21st - Women Poets #8

Feminist? Most definitely. One genre writer? Absolutely not. She wrote poetry, memoirs, novels, and essays. Homebody? Hardly. Ahead of her time? Most certainly in almost every way. As a contemporary of the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound., Hilda Doolittle reveled in the midst of a writer’s extravaganza of experimentation. In a word she, was exceptional for her time and for her gender.

 

She published under the pen name H.D. Feminist. Her unique voice clears proper ladies’ themes of love,  the complexities of relationships, war and death, and , birth and death, gender, and language. H.D. did nothing to vail her bisexuality which made her an early emblem for the early LGBT rights movement and feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. She may have been gone, but certainly not forgotten by this movement, so prevalent today.

Here are a few of her most striking poems. 

Wash of Cold River

Wash of cold river

in a glacial land,

Ionian water,

chill, snow-ribbed sand,

drift of rare flowers,

clear, with delicate shell-

like leaf enclosing

frozen lily-leaf,

camellia texture,

colder than a rose;

wind-flower

that keeps the breath

of the north-wind—

these and none other;

intimate thoughts and kind

reach out to share

the treasure of my mind,

intimate hands and dear

drawn garden-ward and sea-ward

all the sheer rapture

that I would take

to mould a clear

and frigid statue;

rare, of pure texture,

beautiful space and line,

marble to grace

your inaccessible shrine.

Helen

All Greece hates   

the still eyes in the white face,   

the lustre as of olives   

where she stands,   

and the white hands.   

All Greece reviles   

the wan face when she smiles,   

hating it deeper still   

when it grows wan and white,   

remembering past enchantments   

and past ills.   

Greece sees unmoved,   

God’s daughter, born of love,   

the beauty of cool feet   

and slenderest knees,   

could love indeed the maid,   

only if she were laid,   

white ash amid funereal cypresses.

Sea Rose

Rose, harsh rose,

marred and with stint of petals,

meagre flower, thin,

sparse of leaf,

more precious

than a wet rose

single on a stem—

you are caught in the drift.

Stunted, with small leaf,

you are flung on the sand,

you are lifted

in the crisp sand

that drives in the wind.

Can the spice-rose

drip such acrid fragrance

hardened in a leaf?   

Leda

Where the slow river   

meets the tide,

a red swan lifts red wings

and darker beak,

and underneath the purple down

of his soft breast

uncurls his coral feet.

Through the deep purple

of the dying heat

of sun and mist,

the level ray of sun-beam

has caressed

the lily with dark breast,

and flecked with richer gold

its golden crest.

Where the slow lifting   

of the tide,   

floats into the river   

and slowly drifts   

among the reeds,   

and lifts the yellow flags,   

he floats   

where tide and river meet.   

Ah kingly kiss—

no more regret   

nor old deep memories   

to mar the bliss;   

where the low sedge is thick,   

the gold day-lily   

outspreads and rests   

beneath soft fluttering   

of red swan wings

and the warm quivering

of the red swan's breast. 

Background

H.D. became known for her sparse, minimalist, free verse works and association with the 1910s avant-garde. She attended Bryn Mawr College between 1904 and 1906, where she had her first lesbian relationship. After years of friendship, she developed a romantic relationship with Ezra Pound (another famous of the era), and in 1907 they were briefly engaged, much to the disapproval of her parents. Pound moved to London, where he championed and published her work, and she followed in 1911. She left Bryn Mawr after three terms due to poor grades and a near nervous breakdown. She studied at home until 1910. 

Her first published writings consist of stories for children published between 1909 and 1913, mostly under the name Edith Gray. After moving to New York in 1910 she began to write poetry, and on recommendation by Pound, published her children's stories on astronomy in a syndicated Presbyterian newsletter, although these works are now lost.

She co-founded the Imagist Group with the American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound and the writer and poet Richard Aldington, whom she married in 1913. During World War I, she suffered the death of her brother and the breakup of her marriage to Aldington. She befriended Sigmund Freud during the 1930s as a patient looking to understand both her war trauma and her bisexuality.

During her five-decade career, Doolittle wrote in a wide range of genres and formats, but her more complex work was neglected at the time, until a reappraisal by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s, found her one of the foremost 20th-century modernist poets. She was interested in Ancient Greek literature and published numerous translations. Her poetry often borrows from Greek mythology and classical poets, and ranges from the Imagism of her youth to the epic poems composed from the 1940s and beyond. These works are noted for their incorporation of natural scenes and objects, often used to evoke a particular feeling or mood. 

To demonstrate some of the evolutions in poetry that H.D. and her poet friends put forth, consider the following:

1. to reform contemporary poetry through free verse, the brevity of the tanka and haiku forms, and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage from poetry.

2. achieve direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective, 

3. use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation, 

4. compose poetry in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome. 

In 1919, H.D. wrote one of her few known statements on poetics, Notes on Thought and Vision, which was unpublished until 1982. In this, she speaks of poets (herself included) as belonging to a kind of elite group of visionaries with the power to "turn the whole tide of human thought". Take that Monday’s Wannaskan Almanac readers!

Explorations

1. How did the images in the first two poems impress you or not? What do you think of the use of color words in “Leda”?

2. To identify with being a heterosexual remains the norm; however, the LGBTQ identities are rapidly joining the norms of society. Consider your attitudes toward the growing range of potential identities, speculate how they may have affected H.D. if she lived today.

3. If you changed your name, what would it be – other than The Chairman, Word Wednesday, Wannaska Writer, Jack Pine Savage, Kim Hruba, or Mr. Hot Coco – what moniker would you choose?