H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Lara VetterThe fascinating life and work of the groundbreaking, free-spirited modernist poet H.D.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) was one of the first writers of free verse in English, best known for her sparse Imagist poems. For over forty years she wrote poetry that resurrected forgotten ancient goddesses, and autobiographical prose that explored her trauma, her desires and the unique struggles of a twentieth-century woman writer. She was also a scholar of religion, mythology and history, a translator of ancient Greek, and worked in early avant-garde film. Dubbed the ‘perfect bi-’ by Sigmund Freud, she placed issues of sexuality and gender at the centre of her writings. This new biography explores the fascinating life and work of this important modernist figure, once written out of literary history but now receiving the attention she deserves.
The fascinating life and work of the groundbreaking, free-spirited modernist poet H.D.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) was one of the first writers of free verse in English, best known for her sparse Imagist poems. For over forty years she wrote poetry that resurrected forgotten ancient goddesses, and autobiographical prose that explored her trauma, her desires and the unique struggles of a twentieth-century woman writer. She was also a scholar of religion, mythology and history, a translator of ancient Greek, and worked in early avant-garde film. Dubbed the ‘perfect bi-’ by Sigmund Freud, she placed issues of sexuality and gender at the centre of her writings. This new biography explores the fascinating life and work of this important modernist figure, once written out of literary history but now receiving the attention she deserves.
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Lara Vetter’s engaging and well-paced H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), part of Reaktion Books’ series of concise biographies.
'The Gay and Lesbian Review
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[An] acute, compact biography [written] with exquisite delicacy . . . The life that mattered was in the perpetual motion of creation that made biography problematic. She created herself in her writing about her analysis of Freud, about mythology, religion, and a range of ancient and modern subjects that has made it difficult for her biographer to pin down her subject. To Ms. Vetter’s credit, she does not discount the difficulty . . . Such admissions ought to weaken the biographer’s authority, but in Ms. Vetter’s case the opposite is true because she is as supple as her subject.
'New York Sun
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A compelling introduction to this most fascinating life.
'Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars
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Lara Vetter’s elegantly compact biography of modernist poet H.D. opens tantalizingly. What follows is a lively introduction to the remarkable life of a bold, brave, and visionary woman. Written for a broad audience, H.D. is the story of how the girl Hilda Doolittle grew up to become the writer, H.D., one of the greatest modernist American poets of the twentieth century.
'Cynthia Hogue, author of Instead, It Is Dark (poems) and In June the Labyrinth (poems)
Introduction
Chapter 1: ‘Inexorably entangled’, 1886–1911
Chapter 2: ‘My pencil run riot!’, 1911–14
Chapter 3: 'The black cloud fell’, 1914–18
Chapter 4: ‘To make a self’, 1919–26
Chapter 5: ‘The perfect bi-’, 1927–39
Chapter 6: ‘This is not writing . . . this is burning’, 1939–46
Chapter 7: ‘Content, besieged with memories, like low-swarming bees’, 1946–61
References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Lara Vetter is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and her books include A Curious Peril: H. D.’s Late Modernist Prose (2017).