HD Selected Poems [Paperback]

Hilda Doolittle (Author), Louis L. Martz (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 1988

"Like every major artist she challenges the reader's intellect and imagination."—Boston Herald

Selected Poems, the first selection to encompass the rich diversity of Hilda Doolittle's poetry, is both confirmation and celebration of her long-overdue inclusion in the modernist canon. With both the general reader and the student in mind, editor Louis L. Martz of Yale University (who also edited H.D.'s Collected Poems 1912-1944) has provided generous examples of H.D.'s work. From her early "Imagist" period, through the "lost" poems of the thirties where H.D. discovered her unique creative voice, to the great prophetic poems of the war years combined in Trilogy, the selection triumphantly concludes with portions of the late sequences Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definition which focus on rebirth, reconciliation, and the reunion of the divided self.

Editorial Reviews

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.” (Alicia Ostriker - American Poetry Review )

About the Author

H.D. (1886-1961) (the pen name of Hilda Doolittle) was born in the Moravian community of Bethlehem, PA in 1886. A major twentieth century poet with “an ear more subtle than Pound’s, Moore’s, or Yeats’s” as Marie Ponsot writes, she was the author of several volumes of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoirs. She is perhaps one of the best-known and prolific women poets of the Modernist era. Bryher Ellerman was a novelist and H.D.’s wealthy companion. She financed H.D.’s therapy with Freud.

Product Details

• Paperback: 198 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (September 17, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811210669
• ISBN-13: 978-0811210669
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #515,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Incomplete, but a useful introduction to H.D., May 18, 2008

A Kid's Review

This review is from: H. D. Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Selected Poems of H.D.
Compiled by Norman Pearson
NY: Grove Press, Inc., 1957
128 pages


This group of H.D. poems was gathered almost two decades before the Imagist was newly-visited by both scholars and the general reader. Norman Holmes Pearson, a poet who would become one of H.D.'s biggest publishing backers, has chosen poems both popular, and those well-known. From the mysterious "The Helmsman," which opens the collection, to "Epitaph," which ends it, this slim volume serves as an introduction to the poet who was one of the loci for the Imagist movement.

Pearson selected the poems; he offers no introduction of his own. The pieces stand by themselves. For those unfamiliar with H.D.'s work, some will be as enigmatic as a cultic rite. Others will be accessible to those familiar with Greek poetry and myth. Still more are tangible, almost touchable, the material found in Imagism. The 46 poems span H.D.'s oeuvre, but only in a limited way. Notably missing are "Eurydice," from 1916 and "Helen in Egypt," completed in 1955 and which to which Mr. Pearson would have had access. (The first Grove Press edition of "Selected Poems" also was published in 1957; it did not pre-date the Helen edition.)

"Selected Poems" begins with "The Helmsman," H.D.'s puzzling work spoken to the eponymous steersman. From 1916's Sea Garden, it does involve the ocean, and the sprites who run from it:

Oh be swift-
we have always known you wanted us.

We fled inland with our flocks,
we pastured them in hollows,
cut off from the wind
and the salt track of the marsh.

However, as Thomas Burnett Swann said in The Classical World of H.D. (University of Nebraska, 1962) "They revel among the acorn-cups and dip their ankles in the leaf-mould. But they yearn for something beyond the land, something which only the sea holds for them--a harsh kind of peace, probably death itself. Finally they desert their flocks and set sail ... ."

This is in contrast to "Sea Rose," also from Sea Garden, in which H.D. does little more - and little less - than adore that sturdy flower, and describes its delicate endurance:

Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf
...
Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?

H.D. brief but contrastive "Oread," perhaps one of her best-known poems, is here, and again, reflects her concern in an anthropomorphic nature:

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.

A challenge for the reader who is interested in H.D. literary time-line is that Pearson provides neither dates nor the names of volumes. It is understandable if "Epitaph" is believed to be one of her last poems, for it falls at the end of this volume. In fact, it was included in 1931's Red Roses for Bronze, decades before H.D. was nearing the end of her career (she would died 9/29/1961, from complications from a stroke having just passed her 75th birthday). Still, the poem looks both backward and forward on her work, and is fitting that the third and fourth of the four-stanza poem mark her grave:

So I may say,
"I died of living,
having lived on hour;"

so they may say,
"she died soliciting
illicit fervor;"

so you may say,
"Greek flower; Greek ecstasy
reclaims forever

one who died
following
intricate song's lost measure."

Still, the reader must credit Pearson for including the little known "Evadne," from 1921's Hymen, a poem which in which the demi-goddess, a child of Poseidon and Pitane, sings Apollo's praises, even though he, like many members of his extended divine family, raped her. Although the Evadne of myth felt she had to hide her pregnancy, like the Athenian princess Creusa, also raped by Apollo (Evadne would become matriarch to a line of priests, Creusa to the Ionians), The Evadne in "Evadne" seems to fetishize, or at least romanticize, her brief time with the god:

I first tasted under Apollo's lips
love and love sweetness,
I Evadne;
my hair is made of crisp violets
or hyacinth which the wind combs back
across some rock shelf;
I Evadne
was mate of the god of light.

The women in Hymen are strong, some are goddesses in their own right ("Demeter," "Thetis"), another, figure from Greek tragedy, with a series of poems of her own within the volume ("Phaedra.") They are cynical and hopeful alike. Twenty years later, in the midst of and at the end of World War II, H.D. would compose the poems in Trilogy, selections of which are included here. The war poems are a departure from her sunlit landscapes of nymphs and Greek mysteries, they are somber, and Pearson was responsible in including them in his Cold War era volume.

Never in Rome,
so many martyrs fell;

not in Jerusalem,
never in Thebes,

so many stood and watched
chariot wheels-turning,

saw with their very eyes,
the battle of Titans ... .

For the reader curious about H.D.'s poetry. Selected Poems of H.D. is a varied prologemena. For those with biographical curiosity, who want to see her progression as a poet (H.D. also wrote fiction and memoir), I would recommend H.D. Collected Poems, 1912 - 1944. This volume, edited by Louis L. Martz, omits her important later work, but defines the path that H.D. took from young adulthood to mid-life.