H. D.
Hilda Doolittle hung out with the likes of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Pablo Picasso: male chauvinist pigs one and all, so she was almost completely eclipsed by their coronas. But her poetry, I think, is even better than the master’s. She is an Imagist poet, which means that her poetry is often pigeonholed and typecast. I have never given credence to her imagism. Instead, she is much more like Eliot or even Yeats in her ability to weave multiple metaphors and images into a coherent vision. But unlike Eliot, she can sustain these visions over dozens and dozens of poems.
Her best work is Trilogy (1944-46), a meditation on the London bombings during WWII. She weaves Egyptian Mythology, Mathematics, and Moravianism into the best long modern poem next to Eliot’s Four Quartets and Pound’s Cantos. Helen In Egypt (1952-1954) is wonderful as well.
I have written and presented many papers on her work at the American Literature Association Conference and a special conference just on her at Lehigh University in her home town of Bethlehem Pennsylvania.