Imagism was a brief, complex yet influential poetic movement of the early 1900s, a time of reaction against late nineteenth-century poetry which Ezra Pound, one of the key imagist poets, described as ‘a doughy mess of third-hand Keats, Wordsworth … half-melted, lumpy’. In contrast, imagist poetry, although riddled with conflicting definitions, was broadly characterized by brevity, precision, purity of texture and concentration of meaning: as Pound stated, it should ‘use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something … it does not use images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech’. It was this freshness and directness of approach which means that, as Peter Jones says in his invaluable Introduction, ‘imagistic ideas still lie at the centre of our poetic practice’.

Imagist Poetry (Penguin Classics)

Literature & Fiction

H.D.

Ford, Madox Ford

Amy, Lowell

Ezra, Pound

Marianne, Moore

Richard, Aldington

D.H.Lawrence

James, Joyce

Edward Storer

T.E. Hulme

John Cournos

Skipwith Cannell

John Gould Fletcher

F.S. Flint

Poetry

Penguin??Books

End to torment: A memoir of Ezra Pound

New Directions Pub. Corp

HERmione

New Directions

H.D.: Collected Poems 1912-1944

"Surely the most delightful and precious appreciation of Freud's personality that is ever likely to be written. Only a fine creative artist could have written it.... It will live as the most enchanting ornament of all the Freudian biographical literature."―Ernest Jones Bringing together “Writing on the Wall,” composed some ten years after H.D’s stay in Vienna, and “Advent,” a journal she kept at the time of her analysis there, Tribute to Freud offers a rare glimpse into the consulting room of the father of psychoanalysis. It may also be the most intimate of H.D.’s works. Compelled by historical as well as personal crises, the poet worked with Freud during 1933-34. The streets of Vienna were littered with tokens dropped like confetti on the city, stating "Hitler gives work." "Hitler gives bread." Having endured World War I, she was now gathering her resources to face the second cataclysm she knew was approaching. In analysis, Hilda Doolittle explored her Pennsylvania childhood, her relationship with Ezra Pound (inventory of her nom de plume H.D.), Havelock Ellis, D.H. Lawrence, her ex-husband Richard Aldington, and subsequent companion Winifred Ellerman ("Bryher"), as well as her own creative processes. Freud, regarding H.D. as a student as well as a patient, wads hardly the detached presence one might imagine. Revealed here in the poet's words and in his own letters, which comprise an appendix, is the considerate friend, the charming Viennese gentleman―art collector, dog lover, wit―and the pioneer, always revising his ideas and possessed of an insight that could be terrifying in its force.

Tribute to Freud

Hilda Doolittle

Biographies & Memoirs

The classic Trilogy by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), including a large section of referential notes for readers and students, compiled by Professor Aliki Barnstone. As civilian war poetry (written under the shattering impact of World War II). Trilogy's three long poems rank with T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" and Ezra Pound's "Pisan Cantos." The first book of the Trilogy, "The Walls Do Not Fall," published in the midst of the "fifty thousand incidents" of the London blitz, maintains the hope that though "we have no map; / possibly we will reach haven,/ heaven." "Tribute to Angels" describes new life springing from the ruins, and finally, in "The Flowering of the Rod"―with its epigram "...pause to give/ thanks that we rise again from death and live."―faith in love and resurrection is realized in lyric and strongly Biblical imagery.

Trilogy (New Directions Classic)

Children's Books

A feminist, spiritual novel recasting biblical history in the tradition of Lawrence's The Man Who Died and Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ.
Veronica―Pontius Pilate's wife―is beautiful, brilliant, and weary of a life spent in her boudoir and the Roman court. When one of her lovers sends her disguised as a servant to a seer, she feels suddenly alive, experiencing "sudden pre-visions of inner splendor." The seer, Mnevis, arouses the artist, the dreamer in her, eventually telling her of a Jew, a "love-god," who believes women have an important place in the spiritual hierarchy. What follows is a chain of events in which Veronica commits the one genuine act of her life, offering Jesus a "way out" before his crucifixion.
This revision of biblical history―in the tradition of D. H. Lawrence's The Man Who Died and Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ―is not just a novel; but part of the ongoing dialogue about the feminine and divine. Pilate's Wife was written by H.D. in 1929, revised in 1934, and is now finally published by New Directions, edited with an introduction by H.D. scholar Joan Burke. It is a testament to Alicia Ostriker's claim that, among the women poets and novelists of this century, "H.D. is the most profoundly religious, the most seriously engaged in spiritual quest."

Pilate's Wife

Doolittle, Hilda

Brilliant reworkings of Euripides' classic dramas by the great modernist poet H.D., now available in one volume. H.D.'s 1927 adaptation of Euripides's Hippolytus Temporizes and her 1937 translation of Ion appeared midpoint in her career. These two verse dramas can both be considered as "freely adapted" from plays by Euripides; they constitute a commentary in action, and in this regard resemble the Oedipus plays of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound's Women of Trachis. In the first play, the young man Hippolytus is obsessed with the virgin goddess Artemis and discovers the depth of his passion with the sensual Phaedra, his disguised stepmother: this experience brings self-knowledge and death. The heroine Kreousa in Ion attempts to poison Ion when she fails to recognize him as her son by Apollo and sees instead an outsider and possible usurper of her throne. H.D.'s translations of the Greek were greatly admired by T. S. Eliot. In her reworkings, she creates modern versions of classic plays, enabling her to explore her favorite poetic themes. Sigmund Freud (with whom H.D. was undergoing analysis just before she embarked on Ion) commended her translations; and after writing them, H.D. was able to go on to write Helen in Egypt, "a sweeping epic of healing and integration." These marvelous versions attest to H.D.'s claim that "the lines of this Greek poet (and all Greek poets if we have but the clue) are today as vivid and as fresh as they ever were."

Hippolytus Temporizes & Ion: Adaptations from Euripides

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

Dramas & Plays

A landmark book about Sigmund Freud, H.D., modernism, gender, and sexuality. Freud was old and fragile. H.D. was forty-six and despairing of her writing life, which, for all her success, seemed to have reached a dead end. Her sessions with Freud proved to be the point of transition, the funnel into which she poured her memories of the past and associations in the present and from which she emerged reborn. Breezy, informal, irreverent, vibrant in detail, H.D.'s letters to her companion, the novelist Bryher, revolve around her hours with Freud. This volume includes H.D.'s and Bryher's letters, as well as letters by Freud to H.D. and Bryher, most of them published here for the first time. In addition, the book includes H.D.'s and Bryher's letters to and from Havelock Ellis, Kenneth MacPherson, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, and Anna Freud, among others.

Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle

Arts & Literature

The modernist poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was profoundly interested in the occult and during WWII conducted spiritualist séances in her home. Those experiences form much of the basis for her novel The Sword Went Out to Sea, which features an experimental structure and a blending of autobiography, dream, and vision. Even though it was far too complex and eccentric for the popular presses of her day, H.D. believed The Sword Went Out to Sea was "the crown" of her years of serious study of esoteric doctrine as well as of her daily writing practice. It has never before been published.

The Sword Went Out to Sea: (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton

Literary

University Press of Florida

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Books by H.D.