1. HD's career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound.
16 Facts About HD
1. 2.
HD was treated by Sigmund Freud during the 1930s, as she sought to address and understand both her war trauma and bisexuality.
3.
HD's father, Charles, was professor of astronomy at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, and her mother, Helen, was a member of the Moravian brotherhood.
4.
HD attended Friends' Central School in Philadelphia, and graduated in 1905.
5.
HD enrolled at Bryn Mawr College in 1905 to study Greek literature, where she met the poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams.
6.
HD enlisted in the British Army, and she took his place as assistant editor of The Egoist, serving for the next year.
7.
HD became pregnant with Gray's child, but by the time she realized she was expecting, the relationship had cooled and Gray had returned to London.
8.
HD wrote one of her few known statements on poetics, Notes on Thought and Vision, in 1919, although it was not published until 1982.
9.
HD was referred to Freud by Bryher's psychoanalyst because of her apparent paranoia about the rise of Adolf Hitler.
10.
HD began the Trilogy series in 1942, comprising three long, unrhyming, and complex volumes of poems: The Walls do not Fall, Tribute to the Angels and The Flowering of the Rod.
11.
HD moved to Switzerland where she had a severe mental breakdown in the spring of 1946 and took refuge in a clinic until the autumn of that year.
12.
HD used the medium of the long poem to explore and communicate this mix of spiritualities.
13.
HD returned to the US in 1960, when she was the first woman to be recognized with the Award of Merit Medal for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
14.
HD's ashes were brought to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where they were buried in the family plot in Nisky Hill Cemetery on October 28,1961.
15.
HD's headstone is inscribed with lines from her early poem "Epitaph":.
16.
HD's influence is not limited to female poets; many male writers and poets, including Robert Duncan, have acknowledged their debt.