Biography Hilda Doolittle

Poet Biography

Born on September 10, 1886, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Hilda Doolittle was the daughter of an astronomer, and she was reared in the strict Moravian tradition of her mother's family. She entered Bryn Mawr College in 1904 and while a student there formed friendships with Marianne Moore, a fellow student, and with Ezra Pound (to whom she was briefly engaged) and William Carlos Williams, who were at the nearby University of Pennsylvania.

Ill health forced her to leave college in 1906. Five years later she traveled to Europe for what was to have been a vacation but became a permanent stay, mainly in England and Switzerland. Her first published poems, sent to Poetry magazine by Pound, appeared under the initials H.D., which remained thereafter her nom de plume. Other poems appeared in Pound's anthology Des Imagistes (1914) and in the London journal The Egoist, edited by Richard Aldington, to whom she was married from 1913 to 1938. Doolittle was closely associated for much of her life with the British novelist Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman).

H.D.'s first volume of verse, Sea Garden (1916), established her as an important voice among the radical young Imagist poets. Her subsequent volumes included Hymen (1921), Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), Red Roses for Bronze (1931), and a trilogy comprising The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and Flowering of the Rod (1946).

Over the years her sharp, spare, classical, and rather passionless style took on rich mythological and mystic overtones. The Collected Poems of H.D. (1925 and 1940), Selected Poems of H.D. (1957), and Collected Poems 1912-1944 (1983) secured her position as a major 20th-century poet. She won additional acclaim for her translations (Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis and the Hippolytus of Euripides [1919] and Euripides' Ion [1937]), for her verse drama (Hippolytus Temporizes [1927]), and for such prose works as Palimpsest (1926), Hedylus (1928), and, posthumously, The Gift (1982). Several of her books were autobiographical--including Bid Me to Live (1960), Tribute to Freud (1974), and End to Torment (1979).

Helen in Egypt a volume of verse, was her last book, appearing shortly after her death in Zürich, Switzerland, on September 27, 1961.