Black swallows swooping or gliding
In a flurry of entangled loops and curves;
The skaters skim over the frozen river.
And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the surface,
Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver.
“_H. D._”
Hilda Doolittle was born September 10, 1886, at Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania. When she was still a child, her father became Director
of the Flower Observatory and the family moved to a suburb in the
outskirts of Philadelphia. Hilda Doolittle attended a private school
in West Philadelphia; entered Bryn Mawr College in 1904; and went
abroad, for what was intended to be a short sojourn, in 1911. After
a visit to Italy and France, she came to London, joining Ezra Pound
and helping to organize the Imagists. Her work (signed “H. D.”)
began to appear in a few magazines and its unusual quality was
recognized at once. She married one of the most talented of the
English members of this group (Richard Aldington) in 1913 and
remained in London, creating, through a chiseled verse, her pure and
flawless reproductions of Greek poetry and sculpture. In 1920, she
made her long-deferred visit to America, settling on the Californian
coast, returning, the following year, to England.
“H. D.” is, by all odds, the most important of her group. She is the
only one who has steadfastly held to the letter as well as the
spirit of its _credo_. She is, in fact, the only true Imagist. Her
poems, capturing the firm delicacy of the Greek models, are like a
set of Tanagra figurines. Here, at first glance, the effect is
chilling—beauty seems held in a frozen gesture. But it is in this
very fixation of light, color and emotion that she achieves
intensity. What, at first, seemed static becomes fluent; the
arrested moment glows with brimming energy.
Observe the poem entitled “Heat.” Here, in the fewest possible
words, is something beyond the description of heat—here is the
effect of it. In these lines one feels the very weight and solidity
of a midsummer afternoon.
Her efforts to draw the contemporary world are less happy. She is
best in her reflections of clear-cut loveliness in a quietly pagan
world. Her art, in its precision and polish, is curiously Hellenic;
“H. D.,” in most of her moods, seems less of a contemporary than an
inspired anachronism.