Romantic Images Hd Biography
Source(google.com.pk)H.D.’s life and work recapitulate the central themes of literary modernism: the emergence from Victorian norms and certainties, the entry into an age characterized by rapid technological change and the violence of two great wars, and the development of literary modes which reflected the disintegration of traditional symbolic systems and the mythmaking quest for new meanings. H.D.’s oeuvre spans five decades of the twentieth century, 1911-1961, and incorporates work in a variety of genres. She is known primarily as a poet, but she also wrote novels, memoirs, and essays and did a number of translations from the Greek. Her work is consistently innovative and experimental, both reflecting and contributing to the avant-garde milieu that dominated the arts in London and Paris until the end of World War II. Immersed for decades in the intellectual crosscurrents of modernism, psychoanalysis, syncretist mythologies, and feminism, H.D. created a unique voice and vision that sought to bring meaning to the fragmented shards of a war-torn culture. The development of H.D.’s increasingly complex and resonant texts is best understood when placed in the context of other important modernists, many of whom she knew intimately and all of whom she read avidly—especially poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and the Sitwells: and novelists such as D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Colette, May Sinclair, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner. Within this modernist tradition, H.D.’s particular emphasis grew out of her perspective as a woman regarding the intersections of public events and private lives in the aftermath of World War I and in the increasingly ominous period culminating in the Atomic Age. Love and war, birth and death are the central concerns of her work, in which she reconstituted gender, language, and myth to serve her search for the underlying patterns ordering and uniting consciousness and culture.
Following in the footsteps of Henry James and Mary Cassatt and paralleling the paths of Pound, Eliot, and Stein, H.D. lived as an expatriate in England and Europe from 1911 until her death in 1961. Her roots, however, were fully American and provided a heritage that permeated her later life and art. It is well worth knowing about her early life and the meanings she discovered in it because these clusters of associations appear repeatedly not only in memoirs such as The Gift (1982), Tribute to Freud (1956), and End to Torment (1979), but also in much of her poetry and fiction.
H.D.’s childhood began on Church Street in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the close-knit Moravian community in which her mother’s family had been influential since its founding in the eighteenth century by a small band of people persecuted for their membership in the Unitas Fratrum, a mystical Protestant sect. Her grandfather, a noted biologist, was the director of the Moravian Seminary; her mother’s brother was a musician, the founder of the well-known Bethlehem Bach Festivals. Also an artist, her mother taught music and painting to the seminary children. Something of an outsider, H.D.’s father was a professor of astronomy at Lehigh University. To H.D. he was always the calm, detached scientist whom she characterized as “pure New England,” descendant in spirit as well as fact from the Puritan fathers who “burned witches and fought the Indians.” When she was nine, her father became professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Flower Observatory in Upper Darby, near Philadelphia. Into this different world dominated by the upper-middle-class conventions of university life and Main Line society, H.D. brought her rich Bethlehem memories, which blended the warmth of her large extended family, the omnipresent art of her mother’s family, the vivid imagery and melodies of Moravian hymns, and the familiar but mysterious rituals of the Unitas Fratrum—the love feasts, the kiss of peace, and candlelight processions on Christmas Eve.
Hilda was the sixth child and the only daughter to survive in the professor’s large family. From his first marriage, there were Alice (who died in infancy), Alfred, and Eric (H.D.’s favorite half brother and her father’s assistant). With Helen Wolle there were five more children: Gilbert, Edith (who died as a baby), Hilda, Harold, and Melvin. Always feeling “different” as the only girl among five brothers, H.D. remembered asking, “Why was it always a girl who had died?” She later decided that her survival was linked to her “gift,” the combined capacity for artistic and religious inspiration that came from her mother’s family.
Hilda was her austere father’s favorite child. Only she was allowed to play quietly in his study and cut the pages of his new books. As a child, she associated the fables and myths she loved to read with her father’s stars and the astrological symbols filling the pages of his work. Influenced by feminism’s advocacy of the “new woman,” the Professor was ambitious for his daughter. He wanted her to be a second Marie Curie, but his efforts to tutor her in math led to the now familiar syndrome of math anxiety. “The more he explained,” H.D. recalled, “the less I understood.” Eric, to whom she was very close, was more successful, helping Hilda with math and providing her with books by writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, and the Brontës. William Carlos Williams remembered the Professor as a very distant man whose eyes did not focus on anything nearer than the moon, and Sigmund Freud told H.D. that he was “cold.”
Hilda was drawn to her more spontaneous, artistic mother but was repeatedly hurt by her mother’s open favoritism of Gilbert. Trying to get close to her mother, Hilda identified with Gilbert, the prototype of the many brother figures who people her later novels and poems. It was to her mother that she expressed excitement at a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which prompted her to ask, “‘Can ladies write books?’ ‘Why, yes,’ her mother replied, ‘lots of ladies write very good books,’“ Hilda wanted to be an artist like her mother. But her father forbade art school, and her mother’s self-effacement and conventional devotion to the Professor’s work provided a problematic model for her aspiring daughter. H.D. recalled that as a child her mother had loved to sing, but she never once sang after her father complained of the “noise.” “I wanted to paint like my mother,” H.D. wrote in her Freud journals, “though she laughed at her pictures that we admired so.... My mother was morbidly self-effacing.” As a wife in the world of Upper Darby, Helen Doolittle was known for silencing all talk when her husband signaled his desire to speak. Williams remembered her as a bustling, warm-hearted matron always busy with children or her beautiful garden and well-known for her midnight missions to the Flower Observatory with hot water to thaw out the Professor’s frozen whiskers, stuck to the telescope. As Hilda became a young woman, her mother increasingly represented the confines of feminine conventionality from which she had to escape in order to become an artist. But this belief in her artistic destiny did not come easily. The difficulty H.D. experienced in creating an identity that incorporated the various forms of her art and her womanhood is evident in her lifelong fascination with names as “signs” of an underlying self-creation. Not only H.D. but also Edith Gray, J. Beran, Rhoda Peter, Helga Dart, Helga Dorn, John Helforth, D. A. Hill, and Delia Alton were to appear as “signatures” on her published and unpublished work.
The years from 1905 to 1911 were critical for H.D.’s later artistic development, not only because she experienced her first real intellectual and poetic awakenings, but also because as a woman she faced questions of identity revolving around the conflicting demands of sexuality, gender, and vocation. College did not provide the hoped-for environment for rebellion and growth. In 1905 she enrolled at Bryn Mawr College, well-known among women’s colleges for its difficult “men’s curriculum.” In the following year she withdrew from college at mid-year, having done poorly in both math and English. “My essays were held up, as samples of the very worst description,” she recalled years later. In her roman à clef HERmione (1981), written in 1927 and based on her life from 1905 to 1911. H.D. vividly described the crisis of identity she felt at age twenty: “I am Hermione Gart, a failure,” which “meant fresh barriers, fresh chains.” Cut off from earning a teaching salary and being an “O.M., Old Maid precisely,” she felt she was only “a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate over-grown, unincarnated entity that had no place here.”
H.D. found the stimulation that led to an artistic identity in her personal relationships, outside the family and classroom. Most important among her friends were Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Frances Josepha Gregg. She met Pound when she was fifteen. By 1903, Pound and Williams, both students at the University of Pennsylvania, visited the observatory on Sunday afternoons. What comes through Williams’s ambivalent descriptions of Hilda in his Autobiography (1951) is the image of an intense young woman seeking to step outside the confinement of Victorian conventions. Williams found her angular beauty “bizarre,” but was fascinated by her “provocative indifference to rule and order.” She started to write poems, she told him, by splashing ink from her pen all over her clothes “to give her a feeling of freedom and indifference.” Careless about her clothes, she wandered in the woods and fields, climbed fences, and once startled Williams by the ecstatic abandon with which she embraced a summer storm.
Pound, however, was H.D.’s first love and the one she returned to in memory and letters during the last years of her life, as recorded in her memoir End to Torment and her long poem Winter Love (1972). Together they shared their early poems and read William Morris, Algernon Swinburne, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Yogi books, and Honoré de Balzac’s Seraphita (1835). Pound named her Dryad, the wood spirit muse of his earliest poems, especially those in the handmade volume now published as Hilda’s Book (1979). In 1906 and 1907 Pound was a dashingly disreputable poet, but the professor’s disapproval did not halt their developing “understanding” and final engagement. This engagement survived the Professor’s disgust at finding them embracing, the scandal that followed Pound’s resignation from his teaching position at Wabash College in 1907, the consequent need to meet secretly, and the rumors of Pound’s “engagements” to other women. But their plans to marry gradually faded with the continued opposition of her family, the aftereffects of Pound’s sudden trip to Europe in 1908, and Hilda’s increasing discomfort with the idea of marriage. She had dreamed of a bohemian life with Pound, but the more their courtship progressed, the more conventional the romance became. In HERmione, H.D. wrote about feeling “smothered,” “smudged out” by Pound, whose kisses presaged a suffocation of the spirit in which she feared that she would become the object of his poem rather than the poet. “You are a poem, though your poem’s bought,” Pound apparently told her. In End to Torment, H.D. wrote that “Ezra would have destroyed me and the center they call ‘Air and Crystal’ of my poetry.”
H.D.’s love for Pound, but disenchantment with her role as his muse, paralleled a deepening involvement with Frances Josepha Gregg, an intense young woman she met through her college friend Mary Herr, probably in 1910. Gregg wrote poetry and was something of a mystic, whose psychologically difficult childhood led to psychic abilities that entranced H.D. She found in Gregg the lost sister, the “twin soul” whom she described in HERmione as an “alter ego” who could “run, would leap, would be concealed under autumn sumac or lie shaken with hail and wind, lost on some Lacedaemonian foot-hill.” The refrain from Swinburne’s “Itylus,” “O sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow,” which refers to the forbidden love between women, is the line that echoes through much of H.D.’s writings about Gregg—especially in the unpublished novels “Paint It Today” (written in 1921) and “Asphodel” (written in 1921-1922), and in HERmione. Both Pound and Helen Doolittle regarded their intimacy as “unwholesome,” but with Gregg, H.D. felt freed from being the “decorative” object inspiring Pound’s poems. In her unpublished “Autobiographical Notes” (written in 1949) H.D. described 1910 as the “Frances Gregg period” and noted that her first published work appeared in New York syndicated newspapers during that year. However, the first poems which fully pleased her were the lyrics she wrote for Gregg. She modeled these love poems on the pastorals of Theocritus that Pound had brought her. As Barbara Guest has shown, however, her relationship with Gregg was not without its problems. Gregg was not only possessive, but she engaged in a secret liaison with Pound which left H.D. feeling doubly betrayed when she found out. This erotic triangle complicated the poetic one. Pound hurt H.D. again by favoring Gregg’s conventional lyrics over her own poems in the fall of 1911. Breaking the traditional patterns of both creativity and love proved to be a difficult task.
Whatever the stresses in the threesome, H.D.’s relationships with Pound and Gregg succeeded in loosening the control of her family and initiating her life as an artist. Loving both, H.D. was torn in two directions, between heterosexual love and lesbian love, each of which presented its own dynamic fusion of the visionary, the erotic, and the aesthetic. This bisexual pull remained one of the central patterns of H.D.’s later life, one which she discussed extensively with Freud and encoded in much of her writing.
In the summer of 1911, Hilda set off for a short visit to Europe in the company of Frances and Mrs. Gregg. In Paris she saw the musician Walter Rummel frequently, but London and Pound’s literary circle offered the artistic stimulation she had sought for years. With some difficulty she convinced her parents to let her stay, and she returned to the United States for visits only four or five times until her death. Through Pound, H.D. met many of the writers who became her community of friends and fellow artists until 1919—especially people such as Richard Aldington, Yeats, Eliot, F. S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), Violet Hunt, May Sinclair, John Cournos, Wyndham Lewis, Brigit Patmore, Arthur Waley, George Plank, and Olivia and Dorothy Shakespear. H.D. was upset when she failed to convince Frances to stay with her in London (1911) and later devastated by Frances’s sudden letter from the United States announcing her marriage to Louis Wilkinson (1912). In “Asphodel,” part one of which deals with H.D.’s early London years, H.D. described the letter as “vitriolic blue acid” and recalled their earlier pact to be “modern women,” never to marry. Gregg planned for H.D. to join her on her honeymoon trip to Europe, but Pound intervened and convinced H.D. to remain in London. The two women were never again so intimate, although Gregg published poems and fiction in the same journals as H.D., and they met and corresponded sporadically until 1939.
Pound’s own engagement to Dorothy Shakespear also came as a shock to H.D., but increasingly the persistent attention of Aldington began to fill the emotional gap left by Pound and Gregg. They studied Greek together at the British Museum, wrote poetry, and read widely in French and English poetry. From the first, Aldington greatly admired H.D.’s talent and dedication, both of which he believed would lead to important achievements. Aldington, Pound, and H.D. frequently met for tea to discuss life and art, chiefly, Aldington later wrote, to establish “a camaraderie of minds” and to laugh until their sides ached. They spent the spring of 1912 in Paris together, and after the arrival of her parents, Aldington and the Doolittles toured Italy, occasionally joined by Pound. Florence and Venice in particular always carried associations of this early companionship with Aldington, the idyllic quality of which H.D. celebrated in Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) (1960), her roman à clef drafted in 1939 about the years 1912-1919. In October of 1913, Aldington and H.D. were married in the presence of her parents and Pound. H.D. had high hopes that their intimate companionship, based on mutual respect and love for poetry, would lead to a new kind of marriage, one which would foster the creative work of both partners.
By the time she married Aldington, H.D.’s literary career was already underway, her reputation as the best of the imagists well-established, thanks to the efforts of Pound and her own hard work. Imagism, the short-lived but influential movement officially in existence from 1913 until 1917, was launched in the tea shop of the British Museum in September of 1912. H.D. had given Pound three new poems, “Epigram,” “Hermes of the Ways,” and “Priapus” (later titled “Orchard”), and he was impressed with their hardness, clarity, and intensity—the very qualities he associated with the best of poetic tradition and advocated for modern poetry. In End to Torment H.D. recalled the scene: “‘But Dryad,’ (in the Museum tea room), ‘this is poetry.’ He slashed with a pencil. ‘Cut this out, shorten this line. “Hermes of the Ways” is a good title. I’ll send this to Harriet Monroe of Poetry. Have you a copy? Yes? Then we can send this, or I’ll type it when I get back. Will this do?’ And he scrawled ‘H.D. Imagiste’ at the bottom of the page.” H.D.’s recollection almost fifty years later captures the contradictory but crucial role Pound played in the construction of modern poetry. Ever the impresario, Pound was domineering, but generous; blunt, but fair; free with his editing pen, but unerringly sharp in his advice, as he later was in drastically cutting Eliot’s draft of The Waste Land (1922). No longer her fiancé entangling poetry with the demands of a lover, Pound was her greatest promoter. “The strangest thing,” H.D. later wrote, “is that Ezra was so inexpressibly kind to anyone who he felt had the faintest spark of submerged talent.” She was delighted to abandon her surname, which seemed, she later reflected, to mock her aspirations; “Do-little” was hardly an encouraging name for an ambitious young woman. However, the violence of his slashing pen in her description of his naming “H.D. Imagiste” suggests an ominous undertone in his support, as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Janice Robinson have suggested. His power to name, upon which her new identity depended, carried with it a threat to her autonomy as a creative artist, as she was later to explore in HERmione .
Pound believed that she had more than a faint spark of talent, and he wrote to Monroe in October of 1912: “am sending you some modern stuff by an American, I say modern, for it is in the laconic speech of the Imagistes.... Objective—no slither; direct—no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!” The opening lines of “Hermes of the Ways” bear
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