H.D. | |
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Born | Hilda Doolittle September 10, 1886 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, US |
Died | September 27, 1961 Zurich, Switzerland | (aged 75)
Occupation |
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Alma mater | Bryn Mawr College |
Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an American modernist poet, novelist and memoirist who published under the pen name H.D.. She became known for her early short free verse works and association with the 1910s avant-garde Imagist group of poets she co-founded with Ezra Pound and her later husband Richard Aldington. Doolittle went on to have a long career, during which she produced epic works which were only rediscovered during the 1970s.
She was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and in 1911 moved to London, where as innovative modernist poet she was championed by Pound. Between 1916 and 1917 she was the literary editor of the Egoist journal, and was published by the English Review and Transatlantic Review. 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 and, wanting to understand her bisexuality, war trauma and spiritual journey, became his patient.[2]
H.D. was interested in Ancient Greek literature and published numerous translations. Her poetry often borrows from Greek mythology and classical poets, and is noted for its incorporation of natural scenes and objects, often used to evoke a particular feeling or mood. She wrote several novels, the best known being "Hedylus" (1928), "Palimpsest" (1926) and "Bid Me to Live" (1960).
Career
Early life
Hilda Doolittle was born on September 10, 1886, into the Moravian community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.[3] Her father, Charles, was professor of astronomy at Lehigh University[4] and her mother, Helen (nee Wolle), was a Moravian with a strong interest in music. Hilda was their only surviving daughter in a family of five sons.[5] In 1896, Charles was appointed Flower Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania,[6] and they moved to the Highland Park neighborhood of Upper Darby. She attended Philadelphia's Friends' Central High School at Fifteenth and Race streets, graduating in 1905.
In 1901, she met and befriended Ezra Pound, who played a major role both in her private life and her development as a writer. In 1905, Pound presented her with a sheaf of twenty-five love poems with the collective title of Hilda's Book.[7][8] That year she attended Bryn Mawr College[9] to study Greek literature. There she met poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, but left after three terms due to poor grades and, she said, poor health.[10]
Her first published writings, stories for children, were published in The Comrade, a Philadelphia Presbyterian Church paper, between 1909 and 1913, mostly under the name Edith Gray. In 1907, she became engaged to Pound. Her father disapproved of her fiancé,[11] and by the time Pound left for Europe in 1908 the engagement had been called off. Around this time, H.D. started a relationship with a young female art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Frances Josepha Gregg.[12]
She began to write poetry in 1910 while staying in New York, where she published some children's stories on astronomy in a Presbyterian paper.[6] In 1911, she emigrated to Europe together with Gregg and her mother. There she began a more serious career as a writer. Her relationship with Gregg cooled and she met Brigit Patmore, with whom she became romantically involved, and through her met Richard Aldington.[citation needed]
H.D. Imagiste
Soon after her arrival in England, H.D. shared some of her poems with Pound, who had already begun to meet with other poets at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho. He was impressed by her closeness to the ideas and principles he had been discussing with Aldington, with whom he had shared plans to reform contemporary poetry through free verse, the tanka, and the brevity and conciseness of the haiku. In 1912, Pound, H.D and Aldington, the "three original Imagists", launched their principles as:
- Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.
- To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
- As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.[13][14]
The early models for the Imagist group were from Japan, and H.D. often visited the print room at the British Museum in the company of Aldington and the curator and poet Laurence Binyon in order to examine Nishiki-e prints that incorporated traditional Japanese verse.[15]
H.D. became a pre-eminent figure in the Imagist movement[16] In 1915, Pound wrote that he mainly wanted the Imagism to succeed in order to give H.D.'s early poems a breakthrough without her needing to publish a whole book.[16] During a 1912 meeting with her in a tea room near the British Museum, Pound appended the signature H.D. Imagiste to her poetry, creating an abbreviation that she kept throughout her career.[17] However, she told different versions of this story at various times and published under a variety of pseudonyms.[18]
That year the American critic Harriet Monroe launched the magazine Poetry and asked Pound to act as foreign editor. In October, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the rubric Imagiste. Her poems "Hermes of the Ways", "Orchard" and "Epigram" were published in the January 1913 issue.[citation needed] Her poems were informed by her reading of Classical Greek literature, especially of Sappho,[19] an interest she shared with Aldington and Pound, each of whom produced versions of the Greek poet's work. In 1915, H.D. and Aldington launched the Poets' Translation Series, pamphlets based on Greek and Latin classics.[citation needed] She worked on the plays by Euripides, publishing in 1916 a translation of choruses from Iphigeneia at Aulis, in 1919 a translation of choruses from Iphigeneia at Aulis and Hippolytus, an adaptation of Hippolytus called Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), a translation of choruses from The Bacchae and Hecuba (1931), and Euripides' Ion (1937) a loose translation of Ion.[20]
She continued her association with the group until the final issue of the Some Imagist Poets anthology in 1917. Her work also appeared in Aldington's Imagist Anthology 1930. All of her poetry up to the end of the 1930s was written in an Imagist mode, utilising spare use of language,[21] and a classical, austere purity.[22] This style of writing was not without its critics. In a special Imagist issue of The Egoist magazine in May 1915, the poet and critic Harold Monro called H.D.'s early work "petty poetry", denoting "either poverty of imagination or needlessly excessive restraint".[23] One of her earliest and best-known poems, "Oread" (1915), illustrates this early style:[24]
Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us—
Cover us with your pools of fir.
World War I and after
H.D. married Aldington in 1913 with her parents and Ezra Pound as witnesses.[25] Their only child, a daughter, was stillborn in 1915. Aldington enlisted in the army, after which they became estranged: he reportedly took a mistress in 1917 and she became involved in a close but platonic relationship with D. H. Lawrence. Her first book, Sea Garden, was published in 1916, and she was appointed assistant editor of The Egoist, replacing her husband as he joined the army.[citation needed] In 1918, her brother Gilbert was killed in action and that March she moved to a cottage in Cornwall with the composer Cecil Gray, a friend of Lawrence. She became pregnant with Gray's child;[26] however, by the time she realised she was expecting, the relationship had cooled and Gray had returned to live in London.[27]
She met the wealthy English novelist Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) in Cornwall in July 1918.[28] They lived together until 1946 and although both took numerous other partners, Bryher remained her lover for the rest of her life. In 1919, she came close to death during the of her daughter Frances Perdita Aldington—fathered by Gray while suffering from war influenza.[29] During this time, her father, who had never recovered from Gilbert's death, died.[10] In 1919, H.D. wrote one of her few known statements on poetics,[30] Notes on Thought and Vision, which was unpublished until 1982.[31] 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".
H.D. and Aldington attempted to salvage their relationship during this time, but he was suffering from the effects of his participation in the war (possibly post-traumatic stress disorder) and they became estranged, living completely separate lives, but not divorcing until 1938. Aldington became one of her main inspirations for Bid me to live.[32]
From 1920, her relationship with Bryher became closer, and in the pair travelled to the island Lesbos in Greece, then in 1923 to Egypt where they attended the opening of Tutankamuns tomb before settling in Switzerland that year.[10] Bryher entered a marriage of convenience in 1921 with Robert McAlmon, which allowed him to fund his publishing ventures in Paris by using some of her personal wealth for his Contact Press.[33] Both Bryher and H.D. slept with McAlmon during this time. The couple divorced in 1927.[34]
Novels and psychoanalysis
H.D. began three cycles of novels in the early 1920s.[35] The first, Magna Graeca, consists of Palimpsest (1921) and Hedylus (1928), and uses classical settings to explore the poetic vocation, particularly as it applies to women in a patriarchal literary culture. The following Madrigal cycle consists of HERmione, Bid Me to Live, Paint It Today and Asphodel and is largely autobiographical dealing with the development of the female artist and the conflict between heterosexual and lesbian desire. The novellas Kora and Ka and The Usual Star from the Borderline cycle were published in 1933. In this period, she also wrote Pilate's Wife, Mira-Mare and Nights.[35] During this period her mother died and Bryher divorced her husband to marry H.D.'s male lover, Kenneth Macpherson. H.D., Bryher and Macpherson lived together and traveled through Europe in what the poet and critic Barbara Guest termed as a "menagerie of three".[36] Bryher and Macpherson adopted H.D.'s daughter, Perdita.[3] The four of them moved to the shores of Lake Geneva, where they resided in a Bauhaus villa.[37] H.D. became pregnant in 1928, but chose to abort the pregnancy in November.[citation needed]
Bryher and Macpherson foundedp the magazine Close Up (to which H.D. regularly contributed)[10] as a medium for intellectual discussion of cinema. In 1927, the small independent film cinema group POOL or Pool Group was established (largely funded with Bryher's inheritance) and was managed by all three.[38] In the 1930 POOL film Borderline, the actors were H.D. and Bryher and the couple Paul and Eslanda Robeson, the latter acting as wife and husband.[39] The film explores extreme psychic states, racism and interracial relationship.[40] As well as acting in this film, H.D. wrote an explanatory pamphlet to accompany it, a piece later published in Close Up.[41]
Having begun a psychoanalysis in 1928 with the Freudian Hanns Sachs,[10] she traveled to Vienna in 1933 to undergo analysis with Sigmund Freud.[42] She had an interest in Freud's theories as far back as 1909 when she read some of his works in the original German.[43] She was referred by Bryher's psychoanalyst due to her apparent paranoia about the rise of Adolf Hitler. The First World War had left her feeling shattered: she had lost her brother in action, her husband suffered effects of combat, and she believed that its onslaught indirectly caused the death of her child with Aldington, and she believed that her shock at hearing the news about the RMS Lusitania directly caused her child to be stillborn.[44]
On Freud's demand she wrote Bid me to Live, in which she treats her experiences during World War I.[45] Writing on the Wall, an impressionistic memoir of her sessions with him and a reevaluation of the importance of his psychoanalysis, was written concurrently with Trilogy and published in 1944; in 1956 it was republished with Advent, a journal of the analysis, under the title Tribute to Freud.[46]
World War II and after
H.D. and Bryher spent World War II in London, during which her daughter Perdita beccame a secretary of the OSS.[37] During this time H.D. wrote The Gift, a memoir of her childhood and family life in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which reflects on people and events in her early life that shaped her as a writer.[47] She also wrote Trilogy, published as The Walls do not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). The opening lines of The Walls do not Fall clearly and immediately signal H.D.'s break with her earlier work:
An incident here and there,
and rails gone (for guns)
from your (and my) old town square.[48]
After the war, H.D. and Bryher decided to no longer live together, but remained in contact. She moved to Switzerland, but suffered a severe mental breakdown in the spring of 1946, and stayed in a clinic until the autumn of that year. Apart from a number of trips to the United States, she spent the rest of her life in Switzerland.[6] In the late 1950s, she underwent further treatment, this time with the psychoanalyst Erich Heydt.[49] At Heydt's encouragement, she wrote End to Torment, a memoir of her relationship with Pound.[50]
Later life and death
H.D.'s 1950s poetry includes Helen in Egypt (1952–1954), an examination of male-centred epic poetry from a feminist point of view. She used Euripides' play Helen as a starting point for a reinterpretation of the basis of the Trojan War and, by extension, of war itself.[51] This work is seen by critics as her response to Pound's Cantos, a work she greatly admired,[51] and referred to as "her own cantos".[52][53]
A number of her other poems from this period, including Sagesse, Winter Love and Hermetic Definition were published after her death under the collective title Hermetic Definition (1972). The poem Hermetic Definition takes as its starting points her love for a man 30 years her junior and the line 'so slow is the rose to open' from Pound's Canto 106. Sagesse, written in bed after H.D. had broken her hip in a fall, serves as a kind of coda to Trilogy, being partly written in the voice of a young female Blitz survivor who finds herself living in fear of the atom bomb.[54] Winter Love was written during the same period as End to Torment and uses as narrator the Homeric figure of Penelope to restate the material of the memoir in poetic form. At one time, H.D. considered appending this poem as a coda to Helen in Egypt.[55][56] H.D. visited the United States in 1960 to collect an American Academy of Arts and Letters medal, becoming the first woman to be granted the award.[57][9]
She suffered a stroke in July 1961 and died a couple of months later in the Klinik Hirslanden in Zürich.[58] Her ashes were returned to Bethlehem, and were buried in the family plot in the Nisky Hill Cemetery on October 28, 1961. Her epitaph consists of the following lines from her early poem "Epitaph":
So you may say,
Greek flower; Greek ecstasy
reclaims forever
one who died
following intricate song's
lost measure.[59]
Legacy
![](https://web.archive.org/web/20220617011704im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/HD_Plaque.jpg/220px-HD_Plaque.jpg)
The rediscovery of H.D. began in the 1970s, coinciding with the emergence of a feminist criticism that found much to admire in the questioning of gender roles typical of her writings.[60] Specifically, those critics who were challenging the standard view of English-language literary modernism based on the work of male writers were able to restore H.D. to a more significant position in the history of that movement.[61]
Her writings have served as a model for a number of more recent women poets working in the modernist tradition, including the New York School poet Barbara Guest, the Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov, the Black Mountain poet Hilda Morley and the Language poet Susan Howe.[62] Her influence is not limited to female poets, and many male writers, including Robert Duncan[63] and Robert Creeley,[64] have acknowledged their debt. The Dutch poet H.C. ten Berge adapts parts of 'Winter Love' in his 2008 'Het vertrapte mysterie'.[citation needed]
Among her grandchildren was the author and Beatles biographer Nicholas Schaffner.[65]
Selected works
Poetry
- Sea Garden (1916)
- The God (1917)
- Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis and The Hippollytus of Euripides (1919)
- Translations (1920)
- Hymen (1921)
- Heliodora and Other Poems (1924)
- Hippolytus Temporizes (1927)
- Red Roses for Bronze (1931)
- "The Mysteries: Renaissance Choros" (1931)
- Euripides' Ion (1937)
- The Walls Do Not Fall (1944)
- Tribute to the Angels (1945)
- Trilogy (1946)
- The Flowering of the Rod (1946)
- Helen in Egypt (1961)
- Hermetic Definition, New Directions (1972)
- Vale Ave, New Directions (1957–58)[66]
Prose
- Notes on Thought and Vision (1919)
- Paint it Today (1921)
- Asphodel (1921–22)
- Palimpsest (1926)
- Kora and Ka (1930)
- Nights (1935)
- The Hedgehog (1936)
- Tribute to Freud (1956)
- Bid Me to Live (1960)
- End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, New Directions (1979)
- HERmione, New Directions (1981)
- The Gift, New Directions (1982); The Gift: The Complete Text, 1998)
- Majic Ring (1943–44)
- Pilate's Wife (1929–1934)
- The Sword Went Out to Sea (1946–47)
- White Rose and the Red (1948)
- The Mystery (1948–51)
Notes
- ^ "Hilda Doolittle". npg.si.edu. Retrieved January 14, 2020.
- ^ Bertram (1997), p. 39
- ^ a b Scott, Bonnie Kime. "The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States". Oxford University Press, 1995.
- ^ Champion; Nelson. (2000), p. 87
- ^ Gilbert, Sandra M.; Gubar, Susan (2007). The Norton Anthology Of Literature By Women. New York, NY: Norton. p. 280. ISBN 978-0-393-93014-6.
- ^ a b c Pearson, Norman Holmes; Dembo, L. S. (1969). "Norman Holmes Pearson on H. D.: An Interview". Contemporary Literature. 10 (4): 435–347. doi:10.2307/1207690. ISSN 0010-7484.
- ^ King (1981), p. 347
- ^ "Selected Poetry of H. D. (Hilda Doolittle; 1886–1961) Archived February 22, 2012, at the Wayback Machine". Department of English, University of Toronto. Retrieved on October 6, 2007.
- ^ a b "H.D. and Bryher Papers, c. 1916–1972 Archived May 29, 2016, at the Wayback Machine". Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr College Library. Retrieved on October 6, 2007.
- ^ a b c d e Johnson Lewis, Jone (June 5, 2021). "Biography of Hilda Doolittle, Poet, Translator, and Memoirist". ThoughtCo. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
- ^ Nadel, Ira. "The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 5. ISBN 978-0-521-63069-6. OCLC 74523220
- ^ "Doolittle, Hilda (1886–1961) Archived June 27, 2015, at the Wayback Machine". New England Publishing Associates. Retrieved on October 5, 2007.
- ^ Hatlen (1995), p. 107–130
- ^ Elder (1998), pp. 72, 94
- ^ Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard. Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant Garde Archived June 15, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. Oxford University Press, 2011, pp.103–164. ISBN 978-0-19-959369-9
- ^ a b Hatlen (1995), pp. 109–110
- ^ Doolittle, Hilda. "H. D., and Ezra Pound, End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound." New York: New Directions, 1979. p. 18
- ^ Friedman (1990), pp. 35–46
- ^ Keeling, Bret L. "H.D. and 'The Contest': Archaeology of a Sapphic gaze Archived February 16, 2016, at the Wayback Machine". Twentieth Century Literature (Summer 1998). Retrieved on October 6, 2007.
- ^ H.D. (2004). "Introduction". Hippolytus Temporizes & Ion: Adaptations of Two Plays by Euripides. Introduction by Camper, Carol. New Directions. pp. xi. ISBN 978-0-8112-1553-4.
- ^ Marshall; Johnston, Cristin (2005), p. 560
- ^ Ward (2007), p. 241
- ^ Levenson (1986), p. 162
- ^ Gilbert (1979), p. 157
- ^ Pearson, Norman Holmes; Dembo, L. S. (1969) p.437
- ^ Champion, Laurie; Sampath, Emmanuel Nelson. American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000. ISBN 0-313-30943-4. 88
- ^ Korg (2003), p. 50
- ^ Parker, Sarah (ed.), "H.D. and Bryher", The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930, Pickering & Chatto, pp. 131–160, ISBN 978-1-84893-386-6, retrieved April 10, 2022
- ^ Friedman (1990), p. 9
- ^ Blau DuPlessis (1986), p. 40
- ^ Laity (1996), p. 80
- ^ Kelvin (2000), p. 185
- ^ Caserio (2004), pp. 400–402
- ^ Freud, Sigmund; H.D.; Bryher; Stanford Friedman, Susan. Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle. New Directions, 2002. 568
- ^ a b Stanford Friedman, Susan. "Gender, Modernity; H.D.'s Fiction". American Literature 64, No. 4, December 1992. 839–40
- ^ Kakutani, Michiko. "Herself Defined. The Poet H. D. and Her World". Book review, New York Times, January 4, 1984. Retrieved on October 17, 2008.
- ^ a b "Perdita Macpherson Schaffner (1919-2001)". www.imagists.org. Retrieved May 16, 2022.
- ^ Connor (2004), p. 19
- ^ Walton (1997), p. 88
- ^ Walton (1997), pp. 89–90
- ^ Mandel, Charlotte. "Garbo/Helen: The self-projection of beauty by H.D." Women's Studies 7, 1980. 127–35. Retrieved on October 7, 2007.
- ^ Billington, James H. "The Individual: Therapy and Theory Archived April 26, 2016, at the Wayback Machine." Library of Congress. Retrieved on October 7, 2007.
- ^ McCabe (2015), p. 33
- ^ Willis, Elizabeth. "A Public History of the Dividing Line: H.D., the Bomb, and the Roots of the Postmodern". Arizona Quarterly 63, Number 1, Spring 2007. 81–108
- ^ Chisholm, Dianne (1990). "H. D.'s Autoheterography". Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 9 (1): 96. doi:10.2307/464182. ISSN 0732-7730.
- ^ Blau DuPlessis; Stanford (1975), p. 801
- ^ Mandel, Charlotte "H.D.'s The Gift Archived May 11, 2015, at the Wayback Machine". English Literature in Transition 1880–1920. September 1999. 344–48. Retrieved on October 6, 2007.
- ^ Anthology. "Sagetrieb." University of Michigan, 2008. 49.
- ^ Friedman (1987), p. 20
- ^ King (1981), p. 348
- ^ a b Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. "Seaward: H.D.'s 'Helen in Egypt' as a response to Pound's 'Cantos' Archived August 15, 2016, at the Wayback Machine". Twentieth Century Literature Volume 44, Number 4, Winter 1998, pp. 464–483. Retrieved on October 7, 2007.
- ^ Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey, p. 464
- ^ Friedman (1975), p. 801
- ^ De Roche (2021), p. 312
- ^ Sword, Helen. "H.D.'s Majic Ring". Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 14, No. 2, Autumn 1995. 347–62
- ^ Friedman (1975), p. 808
- ^ Beate, Lohser; Newton, Peter M. Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch. New York: Guilford Press, 1996. p. 40. ISBN 1-57230-128-7
- ^ "Hilda Doolittle, Poet, Dead at 75. Imagist Who Signed Works H.D. Wrote Novel in 1960 Archived August 23, 2013, at the Wayback Machine". New York Times September 29, 1961. Retrieved on November 23, 2008.
- ^ Lohr Martz, (1983), p. 299
- ^ Ramsay, Tamara Ann (1998). Discursive departures: A reading paradigm affiliated with feminist, lesbian, aesthetic and queer practices (with reference to Woolf, Stein and H.D.) Archived May 29, 2016, at the Wayback Machine (M.A. thesis) Wilfrid Laurier University
- ^ Friedman (1975), pp. 801–814
- ^ Clippinger, David. "Resurrecting the Ghost: H.D., Susan Howe, and the Haven of Poetry Archived March 4, 2016, at the Wayback Machine". Retrieved on October 7, 2007.
- ^ Keenaghan (2005), pp. 57–90
- ^ Wagner (1983), pp. 103–4
- ^ Schaffner, Val. "Perdita Macpherson Schaffner (1919–2001)". Retrieved February 23, 2019.
- ^ Freedman (1975), pp. 801–814
Sources
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- Blau DuPlessis, Rachel. "H.D., the Career of that Struggle: The Career of That Struggle". Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-253-32702-4
- Blau DuPlessis, Rachel; Friedman, Susan. "'Woman Is Perfect': H.D.'s Debate with Freud." Feminist Studies, volume 7, No. 3, Autumn 1981
- Blau DuPlessis, Rachel. H.D. The Career of that Struggle. The Harvester Press, 1986. ISBN 0-7108-0548-9
- Champion, Laurie; Sampath, Emmanuel Nelson. American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. ISBN 0-313-30943-4
- Caserio, Robert L. "1944–Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page, and: Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924." American Literature volume 76, Number 2, June 2004
- Chisholm, Dianne. H.D.'s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. ISBN 978-0-8014-2474-8
- Connor, Rachel. H.D. and the Image. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7190-6122-9
- De Roche, Linda. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context. Greenwood Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4408-5358-6
- Duncan, Robert. The H.D. Book. Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2011. ISBN 978-0-520-26075-7
- Elder, R. Bruce (1998). The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN 0-88920-275-3
- Evans, Amy. "Accurate Mystery: Robert Duncan's H.D. Bibliography, Critically Annotated", in Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory Vol. 10 no. 2, Spring 2010
- Friedman, Susan. Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, and H.D.'s Fiction. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. ISBN 978-0-5212-5579-0
- Friedman, Susan. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D.. Indiana University Press, 1987. ISBN 978-0-2532-0449-3
- Friedman, Susan. "Who Buried H. D.? A Poet, Her Critics, and Her Place in 'The Literary Tradition'". 'College English, volume 36, No. 7, March 1975. JSTOR 375177
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- Harrell, Sarah Grace. H.D.'s incantations: Reading "Trilogy" as an occultist's creed. M.A. diss. The University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2010. AAT 1488037
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- Hughes, Gertrude Reif. "Making it Really New: Hilda Doolittle, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the Feminist Potential of Modern Poetry". American Quarterly, Volume 42, No. 3, September 1990
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- Levenson, Michael. "A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-521-33800-X
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- Morris, Adalaide. How to Live / What to Do: H.D.'s Cultural Poetics. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-2520-7591-9
- Robinson, Janice S. H.D., The life and work of an American poet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982
- Taylor, Georgina. H.D. and the public sphere of modernist women writers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001
- Wagner, Linda. "The Lost America of Love: Rereading Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan." South Atlantic Review. 48.2, 1983
- Walton, Jean. "Nightmare of the Uncoordinated White-Folk: Race, Psychoanalysis, and Borderline". Discourse, volume 19, issue 2, 1997. JSTOR 41389446
- Ward, Alfred Charles. "Longman Companion to Twentieth Century Literature." University of Michigan, 2007. ASIN: B000RY1UE4
- Zilboorg, Caroline. Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-7190-5972-8
External links
- H.D. Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
- Numerous archival resources are listed on ArchiveGrid.
- Works by H.D. at Project Gutenberg
- Works by H.D. at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- H.D. at Modern American Poetry
- May Sinclair on H.D. in The Fortnightly Review, 1927