H. D.

Hymen (Dodo Press) H. D.

H. D. (1886-1961), born Hilda Doolittle, was an American poet, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her association with the key early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets. Her later writing represents a move away from the Imagist model, towards a distinctly female-centric version of modernist poetry and prose. Her first published writings, some stories for children, were published in a local church paper between 1909 and 1913, mostly under the name Edith Gray. Although the early models for the imagist group were Japanese, H. D. derived her way of making poems from her reading of Classical Greek literature. She continued her association with the group until the final issue of the Some Imagist Poets anthology in 1917. All of her poetry up to the end of the 1930s was written in an Imagist mode, with a spare use of language. Amongst her other works are Hymen (1921), Palimpsest (1926), The Hedgehog (1936) and Tribute to the Angels (1945).