Visions and Ecstasies

Born Hilda Doolittle, H.D. (1886–1961) was a poet and novelist notably associated with Imagism, an avant-garde literary movement that emerged in London during the early twentieth century. Her first, and perhaps best known collections of poetry, Sea Garden (1916) and The God (1917), exemplify the precise imagery and sharp language favoured by Imagism and her contemporaries Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. H.D.’s writing was often deeply personal, merging her unstable personal life, marred as it was with frequent illness and loss, with the evocative images and stories of the ancient world. Together with her lifelong companion Bryher, she travelled throughout Europe, in particular to Greece and Egypt, sites steeped in the mythology of old that would continue to inspire her late into her life and that would have a profound impact on her final poems, such as the revisionary epic Helen in Egypt (1961). Though somewhat overshadowed by her contemporaries in historical and critical accounts of the male-dominated modernist movements, H.D. is considered one of the most important and inimitable writers of her time.Michael Green is a Wolfson Scholar and PhD research student in the Department of History of Art at University College London. He works within the intersections of art, literature, and psychoanalysis, and his current research is specifically engaged with how H.D.’s writings have been used in contemporary art practices.