Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World [Hardcover]

Barbara Guest (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1984

Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World by Guest, Barbara

Editorial Reviews

Review

Far preferable to Janice S. Robinson's H.D. (1982), poet Guest's critical biography of Hilda Doolittle - "H.D." - is continually clear-eyed, closely contextual, and attentive to H.D.'s striving works ("a vital background composed of limited organisms"). The landmarks of H.D.'s life here become a series of pirouettes in the small space of hyper-artistic consciousness - the posturings, the revelations, the achievements. There's full, thoughtful discussion of: the early love affair with Ezra Pound, while still in Pennsylvania; his European molding of Hilda into "H.D., imagiste"; her au courant self-definition as a Greek goddess (in that milieu, "people enjoyed long conversations about purity and simplicity, their eyes fastened on the heavens where dwelt the Greek constellations"); her linkup with rich and nurturing Bryher; her many male lovers (D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, and Cecil Gray, who sired H.D.'s daughter); her analyses with Havelock Ellis, then Freud. And Guest also willingly deals with H.D.'s poetry and prose - without divorcing it from such personal issues as H.D.'s physical beauty, her neuroticism, and her money matters. (Guest judges H.D.'s best prose to be that of the 1950s - especially Helen in Egypt, written when H.D. was past 60.) Occasionally, it's true, Guest's evocative, allusive prose takes a jazzy or cutesy false step. ("Like Mary Poppins arriving by umbrella from another world, the Quaker lady from London, Harriet Weaver, appeared. . . .") But such slips don't detract much from the shrewd literary/psychological/social portrait here - with an H.D. who truly comes across as the distinctive, rare cultural phenomenon she was: the tangent that illuminates the center by its small, off-angled light. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (January 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385131291
• ISBN-13: 978-0385131292
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,704,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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