H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

About the Author:

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H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; London (UK)

Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist, associated with the early 20th-century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, including Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington. She published under the pen name H.D.
Hilda was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1886; she moved to London in 1911, where she played a central role within the then-emerging Imagist movement. H.D. showed Ezra Pound some of her poems; he was impressed by her poems’ closeness to the ideas he had been discussing with Aldington, with whom he had shared plans to reform contemporary poetry through free verse, the tanka and the tightness and conciseness of the haiku, and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage. In summer 1912, the three poets declared themselves the “three original Imagists”, and set out their principles as:
*Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.
*To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
*As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

H.D. had a deep interest in ancient Greek literature, and her poetry often borrowed from Greek mythology and classical poets. She befriended Sigmund Freud during the 1930s, and became his patient in order to understand and express her bisexuality, her residual war trauma, her writing, and her spiritual experiences.

Bookshelf
by Mark Budman

Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)

by Andrey Kneller

In this collection, Andrey Kneller has woven together his own poems with his translations of one of the most recognized and celebrated contemporary Russian poets, Vera Pavlova.

by Osip Mandelstam

This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.

by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

 

by Victor Enyutin

A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor  Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.

by Nina Kossman

A collection of poems in Russian. Published by Khudozhestvennaya literatura (Художественная литература). Moscow, 1990.

Videos
Three Questions. A Documentary by Vita Shtivelman
Play Video
Poetry Reading in Honor of Brodsky’s 81st Birthday
Length: 1:35:40