“This bitter power of song”: Hilda Doolittle, Grecian Masks and Poetic Creativity in Women

Hilda Doolittle 1886-1961 , a.k.a. H.D., remembered today alongside women poets contemporaneous with her such as Louise Bogan, Elenor Wyle, Edna St.Vincent Millay, and Mariannne Moore, first made a name for herself through her affiliation with the imagist and vorticist schools of modern poetry. Although she remained loyal to these technical innovations throughout her poetic career, her later poetry reflects the consciousness of being a woman aware of her creative talents, while revealing a woman poet having acquired a language of her own. A salient feature of her poetry is her use of mythical characters and incidents, which she initially implemented to mask her being an apprentice artist trying to emulate male poets by adhering to their “impersonal line” of poetic understanding. These Grecian elements later became instruments in masking her heightened consciousness. This article surveys her trajectory from diligently following her male “masters” to the writing of her posthumously published Helen in Egypt 1961 in which she has found her own voice, freed of the influence of male discourse as well as of her own anxieties concerning her creativity.

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