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A long time ago (well, in 1912) in a land far, far away (okay, in England) two young poets (Hilda Doolittle and Ezra Pound) were chilling at the library. Ezra was reading Hilda's work as she was getting ready to send her poems off to Poetry magazine for publication.
Ezra, the consummate editor, made a few small changes to Hilda's poems, and then scrawled at the bottom of them "H.D., Imagiste," and then popped them in the mail. They were published soon after, and Hilda Doolittle (now known to the world as "H.D") and Pound were credited with beginning Imagism, a brief but incredibly influential movement in poetry. Imagism was all about short, intense, crystalline, highly visual poems, poems that painted a picture (or, hey, an image) in your mind when you read them. For Imagists, less is more.
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.
"Oread" is one of H.D.'s most famous and most Imagist-y poems. It's short, intense, and it creates one heck of an image in your brain. Imagist poems are all about what Pound referred to as "the direct treatment of the thing" (source). In other words, an Imagist poem gets right to the heart of the matter. No flowery language, no fancy rhyme schemes. Just the thing itself. In "Oread," there are actually two things: the land, and the sea. But there's not much else, and that's exactly how an Imagist poem should be.
Her early poems published in Poetry were exemplars of imagistic principles, they blended mythology and symolist techniques to create a verse from that was classical yet modern. Abandoning Imagism and its ideals of impersonality, H.D. became interested in mysticism and mythical patterns, exploring ancient Greek culture in an attempt to find archetypes that undergirded and resonated with her own personal experiences.
Mythological and biblical allusions are common in her poetry. Her imagist poetry is "impersonal" (like Eliot's)--that is, it's relationship to human emotion is oftn deeply encoded. Her epic poetry is vast and complex in scope; it's linguistic, religious, and psychological dimensions are sophisticated and multilayered. Her perspective as a women is quit different from modernist male poets with whom she shares a great deal.
H.D. was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on September 10, 1886.
She was a poet and novelist known in her own days primarily for her work in the Imagist movement.