Topic > Hilda Doolittle as a modernist poet

Hilda Doolittle, (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an avant-garde American poet, writer, translator and journalist, who took an active part in the imagist and feminist movements and, ultimately, in the psychoanalytic areas. She became popularly known as "HD" when Ezra Pound submitted his first published poems to Poetry magazine with those initials, which thereafter remained his pen name. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at the height of the Victorian era, HD was raised under the strict codes and customs of the Moravian Protestant culture by his parents. His mother, Helen Doolittle, was an artist while his father, Charles Leander Doolittle, was a professor of astronomy at Lehigh University. She was the only surviving girl with five older brothers and was her father's favorite child. Her father was greatly influenced by the compelling idea of ​​the “new woman” in feminism and therefore gave her the necessary education, including mathematics, which she did not like. He wanted her to be a scientist like Marie Curie. Instead, she wanted to be an artist and was more interested in the arts of music and painting that her mother taught children. But her father forbade her, and thus living in a patriarchal society, her mother remained silent to the edict and it was then that HD decided that to be an artist she had to break with all conventionality to become an artist and herself. . What also sparked the rebellious spirit in her came from the years 1905 to 1911, as it was during these periods that she began to question the construct of gender, sexuality, and vocation. In 1905 she enrolled at Bryn Mawr College, a women's college with a curriculum seemingly simpler than that of a men's college. Here, he failed in both English and mathematics and his "essays were considered examples of the worst description". He dropped out of college in 1906 when he was twenty and facing an identity crisis. In her novel a clef, HERmione (1981), written in 1927, she writes of feeling like a "failure", a "spinster" and "a disappointment to her father, a strange duckling to her mother, an importunate entity grown and unembodied that she had no place here Furthermore, her doomed relationship with Ezra Pound and the backstabbing of her friend, lover and poet Frances Josepha Gregg, who she called her "alter ego", having an affair with Pound. made her feel betrayed and hurt. HD will continue to write about lesbian and heterosexual love in her poems. Keep in mind: this is just one example. Get a custom essay from our expert writers now HD reiterate the central themes of literary modernism: the emergence from slow Victorian life into an era characterized by rapid technological developments, deadly wars, and the emergence of the so-called "third world" and literary techniques that attempted to make sense of chaos as a way of responding. His works span from 1911 to 1961, until his death. She was best known as a poet, but she also wrote novels, memoirs, and a couple of translations from Greek. His work is consistently experimental and contributed to the avant-garde movement that dominated the arts of London and Paris. Her fascination and interest in feminism, modernism, psychoanalysis and mythologies gave her a distinct and unique voice that sought to make sense of the pandemonium around her. HD's complex works follow the themes of love, war, birth and death, in which he reconstructs gender, language and myth as a way to subvert and question the culture that had been constructed as the order of life.