Today’s poem features a failed resurrection and a response that spirals through all the customary stages of grief.
Hilda Doolittle was born on September 10, 1886, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She attended Bryn Mawr College, where she was a classmate of Marianne Moore. Doolittle later enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she befriended Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.
H.D. published numerous books of poetry, including Flowering of the Rod (Oxford University Press, 1946); Red Roses From Bronze (Random House, 1932); Collected Poems of H.D. (Boni and Liveright, 1925); Hymen (H. Holt and Company, 1921); and the posthumously published Helen in Egypt (Grove Press, 1961). She was also the author of several works of prose, including Tribute to Freud (Pantheon, 1956).
H.D.’s work is characterized by the intense strength of her images, economy of language, and use of classical mythology. Her poems did not receive widespread appreciation and acclaim during her lifetime, in part because her name was associated with the Imagist movement, even as her voice had outgrown the movement’s boundaries, as evidenced by her book-length works, Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. Neglect of H.D. can also be attributed to her time, as many of her poems spoke to an audience which was unready to respond to the strong feminist principles articulated in her work. As Alicia Ostriker said in American Poetry Review, “H.D., by the end of her career, became not only the most gifted woman poet of our century, but one of the most original poets—the more I read her the more I think this—in our language.”
H.D. died in Zurich, Switzerland, on September 27, 1961.
-bio via Academy of American Poets
H. D.'s "Eurydice"