Flame to the Moths

H. D.
Collected Poems. New York, Liveright, 1925.

“She brooded over each word, as if to hatch it. Then she tried to forget each word, for ‘translations’ enough existed and she was no scholar. She did not want to ‘know’ the Greek in that sense. She was like one blind, reading the texture of incised letters, rejoicing like one blind who knows an inner light, a reality that the outer eye cannot grasp. . . . Anyone can translate the meaning of the word. she wanted the shape, the feel of it, the character of it, as if it had been freshly minted.”
H. D. Bid Me to Live

Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) appropriated Classical myth for her own observant prayers, spells, curses and incantations. Her heterodox strangeness recommended her to the other poets of her time and consorting with Pound, Williams and Moore, her involvement with modernism came early. A sere rhapsodist, she used history and religion for poetic explorations and meditations on the self in the world, and the development of a spiritual life. Her early work, collected in this volume presents: poetry as ancient prayer, poetry as ecstasy, poetry as desire. It is also the obverse of these, fear, coldness and revulsion. Somehow she was, in spareness and directness, the perfect icon of imagism. In reaction to her work, Douglas Bush compared her to Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde and to Isadora Duncan, while John Gould Fletcher imagined her as “half asleep in Greece while the swallows skim through the clear golden air,” Alfred Kreymborg called her “fiery, tempestuous and proud,” and Ezra Pound named her “Nymph, Dryad, Priestess, Goddess.” and “tree born spirit of the wood.” In her reticence, resistance and delicacy, she was as a flame to moths.

H. D. (1886-1961) was raised in the academic atmosphere of the University of Pennsylvania, attended Bryn Mawr College and left the United States for London in 1911 for a summer visit. She returned only once in the next fifty years and died in Switzerland, her home along with London. Before 1925, she published three books of poetry which are all included in Collected Poems: Sea Garden (1917), Hymen (1921) and Heliodora (1924). To a large degree her austere soliloquies and monologues, her prayers, are antidote to the anguish of War as well as the glittering consumerist materialism and triumphal scientific nature of the age. Her classicism was wide ranging and impeccable. She was fascinated by the mind and underwent psycho-analysis with Freud. She believed that art was either sexless or all sex. She stressed the natural and the erotic against the mechanical and belligerent.