Helen in Egypt (New Directions Paperbook)
by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
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Book Summary Information
Author: H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1974-11
ISBN: 0811205444
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Book Reviews of Helen in Egypt (New Directions Paperbook)
Book Review: H.D.: The Long Journey to Freedom
Summary: 5 Stars
The poet H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] was born in Bethlehem, PA to an academic family. Her father, Charles Doolittle, was a Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy. "Everything revolved around him," Hilda wrote many years later. He was stern, patriarch, and hard to impress.
At Bryn Mawr College, she met Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Under Pound's tutelage, she began writing poetry. He gave her the moniker "H.D.," and they became engaged. On an August day in a museum tearoom, Pound both gave her a pen name and determined that she should be a published poet. When she left school two years later under something of a cloud, it was Ezra Pound who introduced her to his literary circle, the Imagists, in London. There she met her future husband, Richard Aldinton, after the Pound relationship wore off. Naturally, she wrote Imagist poetry and submitted much of her work to the harsh review of her mentor, the patriarchal Mr. Pound. She later had a remarkable friendship with D. H. Lawrence and then Cecil Gray, the future father of her daughter. Before the First World War, she emerged as a young woman firmly under the wing of various men. They ultimately had the effect of both promoting and marginalizing her talents.
The war to end wars changed a great deal. In many ways, the pre-war Imagists were poets who reflected in words the aesthetic values of Impressionist painters. They created objectified poetry, based on images of life, both inanimate and human. After the war, the same group of poets [Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens] gradually came to be known as Modernists as they absorbed the harsh realities of the War.
In so far as H.D. was an Imagist, she pursued clarity through precise visual images. As she emerged a Modernist, she discovered the need to write about what Rafael Campos has called "human relationships contextualized in their starkly new and sometimes alienating surroundings."
Here, H.D. found her voice in the experiences of classical females, like Helen. In Homer's version of the Trojan Wars only the male version of the story is told. In H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, the silent heroine speaks for herself. In Helen, it is H.D. who finds a feminist voice with which to speak to the world.
As she gained an independent voice, she started to find other women who were fighting a similar fight. H. D.'s personal relationships with women varied a great deal. She was an early friend of Marianne Moore, who encouraged her. After so many disastrous relationships with men, she took up an openly lesbian relationship with the poet, novelist, and critic Annie Winifred Ellerman, who published under the name Bryher. Together they traveled around Europe through the twenties, writing poetry and generally acting out the lives of wild women of the flapper era.
In 1933-34, H.D. moved to Vienna and studied under Sigmund Freud. She became one of the few cases where he psychoanalyzed one of his students, after which her poetry became even more openly feminist in tone. As she worked with Freud, she kept notes which were later published as Advent. Ten years later, she published a slightly fictionalized version of her psychoanalysis by Freud entitled Writing on the Wall. Today, the two manuscripts have been re-issued by New Directions under the title Tribute to Freud and a fascinating read it is. Dedicating your life to the service of others isn't always the best way to serve the development of your own special talents.
H.D. wrote long before the idea of genuine human equality between the sexes could be openly contemplated. So, her poetry was largely ignored. H.D. spent most of her life trying to free herself.
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