H.D and Modernity

In 1912, at Ezra Pound’s instigation, Hilda Doolittle became “H.D. Imagiste”, her name forever tied to one of the crucial, albeit short-lived aesthetic movements adumbrating High Modernism. Yet H.D. subsequently produced a rich and varied body of work comprising poetry, essays, translations, fiction and autobiographical writings, spanning an exceptionally chaotic half-century, from her first poems published in the January 1913 issue of Poetry until her death in 1961. How should one appraise the ambivalence lying in H.D.’s fascination for ancient cultures and her daily struggle with a baffling, at times even deeply unsettling modernity? A gifted classicist and translator of Euripides with a passion for religions and mythologies, H.D. places her whole literary production under the sign of Hermes, the cryptic god messenger. From “Hermes of the Ways” (1913) to Hermetic Definition and Helen in Egypt (1961), H.D. produces a whole range of complex writings, where modernity emerges between the lines (between the signs) of her atavistic archaism, thereby offering a new hermeneutics, both revelatory and mesmerizing.