Collected Poems 1912-1944

Of special significance are the Uncollected and Unpublished Poems (1912-1944), the third section of the book, written mainly in the 1930s, during H. D.‘s supposed fallow period. As these pages reveal, she was in fact writing a great deal of important poetry at the time, although publishing only a small part of it. The later, wartime poems in this section form an essential prologue to her magnificentTrilogy(1944), the fourth and culminating part of this book. Born in Pennsylvania in 1886, Hilda Doolittle moved to London in 1911 in the footsteps of her friend and one-time fiance Ezra Pound. Indeed it was Pound, acting as the London scout for Poetry magazine, who helped her begin her extraordinary career, penning the words H. D., Imagiste to a group of six poems and sending them on to editor Harriet Monroe in Chicago.The Collected Poems 1912-1944traces the continual expansion of H. D.’s work from her early imagistic mode to the prophetic style of her hidden years in the 1930s, climaxing in the broader, mature accomplishment ofTrilogy. The book is edited by Professor Louis L. Martz of Yale, who supplies valuable textual notes and an introductory essay that relates the significance of H. D.’s life to her equally remarkable literary achievement.