Analysis Of Vhilda Doolittle

vHilda Doolittle was a 20th century American poet belonging to the avant-garde Imagist group along with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. The Imagist movement in poetry with its definite stress on ‘preparedness for writing’, ‘impersonality in written work’ and objective treatment of things through the use of images that ‘have a variable significance’ (Pound, 36) sees its most creative use in H.D’s poems. Unlike works by Eliot or Pound which follow more of what Albright labels as ‘particle nature of poetry ’, H.D’s poems on the other hand make a conscious move away from and yet adheres to the Imagist dictum of ‘make new’.

According to the modernist poetics, a poem’s strongest meaning resides in its smallest elements – symbols, image, vortex have a

As its amplitude and frequency increase, the poem-wave loses any sense of a finite subject in a particular historical situation’ (Alright, 21). Not only specific to H.D, this measure of poetry could also be used to analyze some poems by Eliot and Pound. A central tenant of this kind of poetics is the frequent use of aquatic metaphors where the whole world is described in the form of an ocean – which recurs frequently in Eliot’s poems like ‘The Wasteland’, ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘The Four Cantos’ and so on- a more specific example being H.D’s ‘Oread’ where she

The individual subject is displaced in favour of a universal emphasis, such that disturbance at one point could, in such a fluid movement, lead to a universal disturbance. This was also the kind of effect that the modernist movement aimed to achieve, as Eliot writes in Tradition and Individual Talent,

‘The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with the feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and constitutes of a simultaneous order...no poet or artist has a complete meaning alone’ (40)

II

Beginning with ‘Edith Gray’, Hilda Doolittle has used several pseudonyms for her writings which include J. Brenan, Rhoda Peter, Helga Dart, Helga Dorn, John Helforth, D.A. Hell, Delia Alton and more popularly H.D. While this conscious attempt at trying to hide her personality is in tandem with the major thrust of the modernist movement to move away from the mushy and to objectify passion or emotions with images which are at once universal and of contemporary appeal; it also forms a part of her poetic strategy. As has been previously argued, H.D is at once a modernist and a deviant from this label. This could be more legitly explained from the fact that she was a woman poet trying to carve a niche for herself in a predominantly masculine world. As Cixous would call