A Clear Phantasmagoria

On H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)'s poetry

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

I used to think that objectivism and mysticism in writing were mutually exclusive, as if there was an unspoken rule in my mind: if I wanted to write about oneiric concepts, the language should reflect that, and if I was dealing with reality, I should adopt a matter-of-fact attitude. Of course, with experience (in writing and reading) comes the discovery of relativity and nuance, of the non-absoluteness in life and art. An example of this dichotomous possibility is the poetry of H.D. (an acronym for Hilda Doolittle), which I would describe as “concrete dreams” that connect distant visions with a hard reality.

Born in 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Hilda was raised in her mother's Moravian, rigid but mystical Protestantism, a tradition that influenced her to include religious and esoteric elements in her poetry. Most critics use words like ‘hardness’, ‘purity’, and ‘loneliness’ to describe her work since her poems usually include some kind of suffocating, yearning atmosphere, wrapped in short, clear, and sharp verses. Joseph N. Riddel described H.D.’s early volumes like Sea Garden (1916) as:

“a world of stark, pristine beauty, occasionally threatened by the softness of decay or the oppressiveness of a suffocating heat; a world of willed objectivity which hardly conceals the inwardness that reminds the self of its imminent nothingness. The objectivity of H. D.'s world is a kind of ultimate subjectivity – the triumph of an imagination that somehow survives its isolation”

H.D.’s life is almost as interesting as her poetry. In 1911, she traded her comfortable life in Philadelphia for bohemian London, where she met and befriended many artists like T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Mariane Moore and Annie Winifred Ellerman, known by the pen name Bryher. She gained the mysterious identity of the modernist poet ‘H.D’. in 1913 after her friend (and ex-fiancé) Ezra Pound signed her poems ‘H.D. Imagiste’ and sent them off to be published in Poetry magazine. She then married the English poet Richard Aldington, but the start of World War I changed everything: her pregnancy ended in a still-birth, Aldington returned from the war shattered by its trauma, and their marriage grew increasingly unhappy. They eventually separated, and H.D. began a series of travels in Greece, Egypt and Italy from 1919 to 1923 with the writer Bryher, which brought her back to a productive, creative life and gave H.D. many of the fundamental motifs and symbols of her later work.

H.D. is mostly associated with the Imagist movement, so much so that Aldington argued in retrospect that ‘the Imagist movement was H.D. and H.D. was the Imagist movement’. Imagist aesthetic conveys ‘a radical compression of language and the conversion of the prosaic and every day to the essential.’ In other words, an imagist poem is envisioned as an image of a thing. Since it was part of modernism and therefore went against many Victorian aesthetics and conventions, we could say that an imagist poem resembles more a photograph than a painting, especially considering its aim at precision, immediacy, and objectivity — the word becomes an image stripped of rhetorical ornament.

The poems H.D. showed to Pound in 1912 (‘Epigram,’ ‘Hermes of the Ways,’ and ‘Orchard’) impressed him with their hardness, clarity, and intensity — the very qualities he advocated for modern poetry, as seen in the March 1913 issue of Poetry Magazine, in which Pound published two articles on imagist ‘rules’, establishing as rule number one the ‘Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.’. However, while H.D.’s imaginative and influential position in the modernist school should be recognised, Imagism was not synonymous with H.D. since she transcended the movement from the beginning, as Louis Martz argues:

The restless movement, the constant surging of intense vitality, lies at the centre of H.D.'s early poetry, and thus the static, lapidary, crystalline implications usually carried by the word imagism could never contain the strength of H.D.’s muse.

H.D.’s work often balances dualities, creating a paradoxical interplay between intense passion and measured objectivity. This tension infuses her poetry with a dynamic energy, as noted by critics who have identified an animistic or phantasmagoric quality in her imagery, reflecting both spiritual ecstasy and restraint. In the poems I will be discussing, Fragment XXXVI and Sheltered Garden, the structure is based on polarities such as land and sea, hard and soft, ripe and unripe, wild and sheltered, torn and whole, positive and negative, dream and reality, and so forth. These oppositions illustrate the internal divisions H.D. always felt, describing her ‘two minds’ in Fragment XXXVI as ‘two white wrestlers / standing for a match’.

In H.D.’s early book Sea Garden, she arranges the poems so they together constitute an enclosed space that offers reflection on symbolic objects (such as flowers indicating feelings) and she also uses Greek models for this, mainly based on Sappho. ‘Sheltered Garden’ is a prime example of this, highlighting the poet’s desire to escape from the claustrophobic ‘border-pinks’ of the domestic garden into the ‘coarse weeds’ of ‘some terrible/wind-tortured place’ – a place of Sublime beauty. H.D.’s celebration of the wild and the harsh carries overtones of her denial of traditional femininity. Many of her poems – imagist or not – implicitly question culturally prescribed gender roles and promote an opaque identity. These patterns reflect H.D.’s emergence from a Victorian past as she tries to find herself through the negation of such traditions.

H.D.’s poem “Sheltered Garden” (1916)

‘Sheltered Garden’ is full of sensory words: astringent, aromatic, bitter, scent, taste – these words contribute to a sensual intensity in the atmosphere of the poem despite its restraint: a duality characteristic of H.D. The garden is not positively portrayed: the narrator observes that there is no wildness, no mystery or lush wilderness – it’s almost unnaturally tamed and empty, which makes the narrator yearn for some kind of prelapsarian garden, as Eden is described in the first half of Paradise Lost. The annoyance (‘I have had enough’) at the restriction of this garden can also be interpreted from a feminist perspective: the idea of a woman being confined to a contrived beauty (‘scented pinks’) devoid of freedom to have her own experiences (‘let the cling,/ ripen of themselves,/ test their own worth…/ to fall at last but fair’). Another indication of that is the reference to pears and melons, which are common symbols of femininity, that appear in the poem ‘smothered’ and ‘wadded’ by artificial botanical techniques.

The sheltered quality of the garden symbolizes her feelings of imprisonment both physical and linguistic: she seems to struggle with definitions and wants to escape them (I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism ‘to define is to limit’). The struggle is evidenced by the presence of hard words such as ‘break,’ ‘torn,’ ‘twist’, ‘snap off,’ ‘choke’, ‘scatter’, etc. which, together with the natural imagery and emotional vulnerability of the poem, forms the earlier description of her poetry being paradoxically harsh and delicate.

The criticism I’ve read about H.D.’s life and work consistently portrays her as an unjustly overlooked poet. The prevailing explanation for this is the pervasive sexism of her time, which undervalued her exploration of women’s struggles with intellectual and sexual liberation. Besides, H.D. took significant creative liberties with mythology and translation in her poetry, since she did not restrain herself to accuracy or tradition. Instead, her use of myth was deeply personal: she reimagined mythological characters, identifying mythic figures with her own psychological states and shaping their aesthetic and emotional essence to align with her artistic vision rather than their original contexts. Some critics often dismissed this approach at the time as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘amateurish.’

H.D.’s poem Fragment XXXVI (1924) - a translation of Sappho

The poem Fragment XXXVI is an interesting example of H.D’s relationship with Greek culture because it is a curious translation of Sappho (or rather a transformation) that expands the original poem through a personal interpretation, perhaps imagining what Sappho might have written if the whole poem had survived. I’m fascinated by translation as a craft and as a unique form of writing full of technical and ethical constraints, and I find what H.D. did with these fragments from Sappho incredibly imaginative, and reminded me of what Mary Sydney did with her Psalms translations.

Sappho’s original verses are: ‘I know not what to do / my mind is divided’. H.D. takes this hesitant premise and makes it more intense and complex through the repeated use of questions and sensual imagery. Similar to ‘Sheltered Garden’, she uses sharp words like ‘break,’ ‘devouring,’ ‘rapture,’ ‘dart,’ ‘pulse,’ and so forth. The poem deals with an intense longing for a lover and the struggle between materialising or idealising this love: when the narrator asks ‘is song’s gift best? / is love’s gift loveliest?’ She is torn between singing about the lover and turning them into a muse (an idealisation) loving them and then facing the reality of the desire.

The longing expressed here is not only for the beloved, but also for death as a relief from the torments of passion. This sentiment is quite romantic for a modernist poet, especially considering the descriptions of the lover as a corpse (‘press lips to lips / that answer not’). The narrator ends his reflection unresolved with a question, comparing herself to a ‘wave hesitant’. When read out loud (you should try it), the whole structure of the poem seems to waver, due to the rhythm of these questions.

Her theory of translation can be found in her autobiographical novel Bid Me To Live (1960), in which she broods over each word, then discards its dictionary meaning prioritising its texture and feel. In this way, she will not only translate the word but will ‘coin’ new ones based on moods and the senses:

She was self-effacing in her attack on those Greek words, she was flamboyantly ambitious. The words themselves held inner words, she thought. If you look at a word long enough, this peculiar twist, its magic angle, would lead somewhere, like that Phoenician track, trod by the old traders. She was a trader in the gold, the old gold, the myrrh of the dead spirit. She was bargaining with each word. (BMTL, p. 162)

The insufficiency of language is something that constantly arrests my attention: I cannot exhaust this topic – everything I write seems to come back to this – because I can't come to terms with the fact that the only tool we have for communicating with the world and thinking about it is hopelessly flawed and inaccurate. Finding another author offering me yet another perspective on the subject is always a thrilling encounter. It’s a distinctive modernist preoccupation, seen in Eliot’s and Joyce’s works, and certainly in H.D.’s.

In poems XIII and XIV of Tribute to the Angels (1945), H.D. expresses anguish due to the impossibility of accurately naming a “jewel colour”. She evokes beautiful, “opalescent” images and assumes her defeat in this wordplay when faced with the impossibility of inventing a satisfying name:

I do not want to name it,
I want to watch its faint

heart-beat, pulse-beat
as it quivers, I do not want

to talk about it,
I want to minimize thought,

concentrate on it
till I shrink,

dematerialize
and am drawn into it.

She seems more interested in expressing the interiority of an object (the jewel) rather than naming – and thus limiting – it, yet since we can only express ourselves through language, the ceremony of naming, of struggling to find words, is inescapable. So she must be simple, essential (her modernist trait); she must distill the language until she excavates the Truth. The compression of those poems (which reminds me of Dickinson) aims at a direct intensity yet it can, paradoxically, make them more hermetic sometimes. This is what I mean with ‘concrete dreams’ – the Truth she yearns for, the essence she tries to describe, is always obscure and often sublime, as if the reality she belongs to is part of some distant realm and the only way to reach it is through a crystalline poetry. Thus, she must ‘dematerialize’ her language, until we are all ‘drawn into it’.