H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

My bat-like thought-wings would beat painfully in that sudden searchlight, H.D. writes in Tribute to Freud, her moving memoir. Compelled by historical as well as personal crises, H.D. underwent therapy with Freud during 1933 34, as the streets of Vienna were littered with tokens dropped like confetti on the city stating Hitler gives work, Hitler gives bread. Having endured World War I, she was now gathering her resources to face the cataclysm she knew was approaching. The first part of the book, Writing on the Wall, was composed some ten years after H.D. s stay in Vienna; the second part, Advent, is a journal she kept during her analysis. Revealed here in the poet s crystal shard-like words and in Freud s own letters (which comprise an appendix) is a remarkably tender and human portrait of the legendary Doctor in the twilight of his life. Time double backs on itself, mingling past, present, and future in a visionary weave of dream, memory, and reflections.

Notes on Thought and Vision by Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) is an aphoristic meditation on how one works toward an ideal body-mind synthesis; a contemplation of the sources of imagination and the creative process; and a study of gender differences H.D. believed to be inherent in women's and men's consciousness. Here, too, is The Wise Sappho, a lyrical tribute to the great poet of Lesbos, for whom H.D. felt deep personal kinship.""Notes" is filled with dualisms that seem to split experience at all levels: body and spirit, womb and head, feeling and thought, the unconscious and ego consciousness, female and male, nature and divinity, classical and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian, Sphinx and Centaur, Pan and Helios, Naiads and Athene, thistle and serpent. But the impulse behind "Notes" is to account for those mysterious moments in which the polarities seemed to fall away, or more accurately to find their contradictions lifted and subsumed into a gestalt that illuminated the cross-patch of the past and released her to the chances of the future."  Albert Gelpi, Introduction"H. D.'s Notes on Thought and Vision [is] such a unique, inspiring, exploration of her notion of the creative process, orchestrated through an array of fully female, not feminine, not feminist, female figures."  Paul Kameen, University of Pittsburgh, English DepartmentHilda "H.D." Doolittle (1886-1961) was a poet, novelist, and memoirist well-known for her role with the avant-gard Imagist group. Though born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, her publications took off in London and earned her a spot within the emerging Imagist movement. She is also known for being unapologetic about her sexuality and is an icon for LGBT rights and feminist movements.