Hilda Doolittle: The Female Imagist Poet

Hilda Doolittle was one of the leading members of the Imagist movement. Alongside Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, she helped to craft the tenants of the imagist style. Her work is packed full of beautiful lyrics and memorable images that convey her meaning clearly and movingly. Although the movement was short-lived, her work certainly is not. Hilda Doolittle’s poetry explored a number of themes through her work, such as feminism, myths, and the natural world. She made an outstanding contribution to the development of modern free verse.

Life Facts

• Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in September 1886. Doolittle went on to attend Bryn Mawr College, where she studied Greek literature.
• She met Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams while at Bryn Mawr.
• In 1913, Doolittle married Richard Aldington.
• Doolittle’s collection Hymen was published in 1921.
• She died September 27, 1961, in Zürich, Switzerland.

Interesting Facts

• Ezra Pound created and gifted Doolittle with a book of love poems titled Hilda’s Book. 
• Doolittle left university due to bad health and failing grades.
• In the spring of 1946, Doolittle suffered a mental breakdown.
• She was analyzed by Sigmund Freud.

Famous Poems

• ‘Oread’ is told from the perspective of a wood nymph who tries to command the sea to “whirl.” Throughout this piece, the poet depicts the sea through the mind of a wood nymph who sees everything in the context of the forest and pine trees. The images are beautiful and strikingly memorable.
• ‘Helen’ depicts scenes from the Trojan War and the hatred people felt towards Helen, who was at the center of it. The Greek people feel nothing but hate in regard to Helen of Troy, the speaker says. There is nothing of empathy or understanding there. They hate what she looks like, the fact that she was ever happy. The only way, the speaker says, that this might change is if she died.
• ‘Sheltered Garden’ depicts one speaker’s work, which is beautiful but full of nothing and a new world she’s looking towards. She states that she’d rather meet her death than live on in her world of repetition and dullness any longer. If she could, she would tear her world apart.
• ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’ was written in the later part of Dootlittle’s career. It takes on religion, the zodiac, as well as some autobiographical elements. The poem is quite long, and it eventually became a Trilogy. 
• ‘Sea Rose’ was published in Dootlittle’s first collection Sea Garden. It was the first poem in this book and used the sea rose as an image of beautiful durability. It can outlast other beauties and suggests that valuable things can be found in unusual places.

Early Life

Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in September 1886. Her parents, Charles and Helen Doolittle, a professor of astronomy and a passionate lover of music, raised their daughter in a Moravian community. Of the couple’s five children, Hilda was the only surviving daughter. In the mid-1890s, Doolittle’s father was named Flower Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and the family moved to Upper Darby. It was here that Doolittle attended high school, graduating in 1905.

It was also around this time period that Doolittle met Ezra Pound, who is known today as one of the most prominent modernist writers and the founder of the Imagist movement. He would have a great influence on Doolittle’s life and writing. In the same year that she graduated from college, Pound created for her a book of love poems titled Hilda’s Book. 

Doolittle went on to attend Bryn Mawr College, a private women’s college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. While there, she studied Greek literature but was forced to leave the institution after a period of bad health and poor grades. Her time at Bryn Mawr, although short, did allow her to meet fellow poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams.

Doolittle’s first works, which were mainly stories for children, were published in The Comrade, a paper run by a local Presbyterian church. She did not use her own name but instead published under the pseudonym Edith Gray. This would become her habit in later life. Around this same time, Doolittle was briefly engaged to Ezra Pound. The relationship ended due to a lack of approval from her father and Pound’s sojourn to Europe.

Literary Career

In 1911, after entering into a relationship with a female art student, Doolittle also moved to Europe. It was here that she would embark on a truly professional career as a poet. She lived mainly in England and Switzerland and remained friends with Pound while residing there. He would help her get her first poems published in Poetry magazine. At this time, her work appeared under the name she is known by today, H.D. She, along with Pound and another poet, Richard Aldington, considered themselves to be the founders of the Imagist movement.

In 1913, Doolittle and Aldington married, and two years later, Hilda gave birth to their one and only child, who was stillborn. Aldington soon enlisted in the army, and the couple separated, perhaps due to Aldington being unfaithful. Doolittle’s first volume, Sea Garden, was published around this time. She was also soon appointed as the assistant editor of The Egoist, a role her husband had previously held. She published The God and Translations in 1917 and 1920.

Writing Career and Relationships

Doolittle continued to meet and befriend men and women who would become known as some of the greatest poets of the modern age. This included D.H. Lawrence, with whom she remained close friends for a number of years. It was through this connection that she met and moved in with Cecil Gray. Doolittle fell pregnant with Gray’s child, only realizing what had happened after moving back to London.

Although separated from her husband, Aldington, the couple were still legally married. When he returned to London from the war, he was suffering from PTSD, which sent the couple even further apart. It would be many years before the two eventually divorced in 1938.

Doolittle’s next collection was Hymen published in 1921. For a decade after this, she was incredibly prolific, publishing four full-length volumes of poetry and one verse drama. One of these was Heliodora and Other Poems, coming into existence in 1924. Hippolytus Temporizes and Red Roses for Bronze were published in 1927 and 1931, respectively. Throughout her life, Doolittle also published a number of volumes of prose. In the early 1920s, three of her books, Paint it Today, Asphodel, and Palimpsest, were published.

Doolittle’s work garnered interest during the 1970s and 1980s, which ultimately resulted in the publication of a number of her unpublished works by the well-respected publisher New Directions. In 1927, she created the autobiographical novel HERmione. Remarkably, the work was published decades later, in 1981. A posthumous release in the form of End to Torment also occurred in 1979. The work is a memoir of Pound.

During the mid-1940s, Doolittle was active despite the turbulence of World War II. She produced a trilogy of books; The Walls Do Not Fall in 1944, Tribute to the Angels in 1945, and The Flowering of the Rod a year later in 1946.

Around 1920 Doolittle entered into a long-lasting relationship with Annie Winifred Ellerman, more widely known as Bryher, who was also a novelist and writer. The two would remain lovers for the rest of Doolittle’s life but were far from exclusive. They spent time traveling, going from Egypt to Greece and eventually to Switzerland, where Doolittle remained.

Death

In the spring of 1946, Doolittle suffered a mental breakdown. She was confined to an asylum in Switzerland for most of the year. She underwent a number of treatments during the later years of her life, including a period of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud. She visited Freud in Vienna, but due to the Nazi regime, her time with him was cut short.

Hilda Doolittle died in Zurich, Switzerland, after suffering a stroke in July of 1961. She was visiting the country to collect an American Academy of Arts and Letters medal. During the final years of her life, she wrote prolifically, including one of her better-known pieces, Helen in Egypt. Her final prose work, Bid Me to Live, was published a year before she died. Since her death, a number of works have been issued posthumously. These include never before published works like Pilate’s Wife and The Mystery.

Influence from other Poets

Hilda Doolittle was notably influenced by writers such as Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. She also looked to Ancient poetry for inspiration, with both Sappho and Euripides being important figures in the development of her style.

FAQs