Hilda Doolittle - Wind Sleepers & Other Verse
Public Domain Poets #18 | Publicdomainpoets.com
Containing a generous selection of Hilda Doolittle's poems from 'Sea Garden' (1916), 'Hymen' (1921), 'Heliodora' (1924), and the various Imagist anthologies (1914-1917); with illustrations by Helen Saunders & Dorothy Shakespear. New edition designed and edited by Dick Whyte.
Whirl up, sea-
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.
H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] (1886-1961) was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and her family moved to Upper Darby when she was a child, She became friends with Ezra Pound as a teenager, began writing poetry, and briefly attended Bryn Mawr College, where she first explored her bisexuality, and met fellow poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Pound moved to London in 1908, followed by Doolittle in 1911, and they became close with the poet, Richard Aldington.
Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you-banded one?
Together they began writing 'free verse' at a time when English-language poetry was almost exclusively metered and rhymed, calling their work 'Imagiste' (after the 'School of Images', active 1908-1909). Though Doolittle's first poems were published due to Pound's influence, his dictatorial approach to poetics led to a split in the group, with Amy Lowell leading the 'new' lmagists, now including Doolittle, Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, D.H. Lawrence, and F.S. Flint (a founding member of the earlier Imagist group). They would go on to oversee the publication of 3 Imagist anthologies between 1915-1917, highly influential on the post-1913 'new verse' and 'free verse' movements which blossomed in their wake.
You crash over the trees,
you crack like the live branch:
the branch is white,
the green crushed,
each leaf is rent like split wood.
Public Domain Press produces new editions of out-of-print poetry, with a focus on compressed & fragmented 'free verse' from the late-1800s & early-1900s, & the early history of English-language tanka & haiku. Verses are carefully selected & spaciously laid-out, adorned with illustrations & ornaments from the books & magazines they originally appeared in. These are not simply "reprints" of previously existing books, but newly crafted collections, lovingly edited from public domain material, for the serious poetry lover.