Susan Friedman (Essay Date March 1975)

SOURCE: Friedman, Susan. "Who Buried H. D.?: A Poet, Her Critics, and Her Place in 'The Literary Tradition.'" College English 36, no. 7 (March 1975): 801-14.

In the following essay, Friedman contends that "as a woman writing about women, H. D. explored the untold half of the human story, and by that act she set herself outside of the established tradition."

H. D. is a major twentieth-century poet who all too often receives the response "H. D.?—who's he?" When people are reminded that "H. D." was the pen name for Hilda Doolittle, it is generally remembered that she was one of those imagist poets back in the beginning of the century who changed the course of modern poetry with their development of the "image" and free verse. Her early poems, like "Oread" or "Heat," still appear regularly in modern poetry anthologies, but...