Trilogy

Doolittle Hilda

HD's war "Trilogy" ranks with Eliot's "Four Quartets", Pound's "Pisan Cantos" and poems like Edith Sitwell's "Still Falls the Rain" as civilian war poetry in a war which tore apart so many of the cities of Europe. The outer violence of the scene touches the deepest nerves, bringing together a remarkable range of human experience and response.

"The Walls Do Not Fall" (1944), "Tribute to the Angels" (1945) and "The Flowering of the Rod" (1946) were first published in small editions which became collectors' items. They were brought together for the first time in 1973 and recognised as a major poem of our time in which HD decisively transcends the purism of her early styles. With deft indirection she uncovers, through modulation and subversion of a language burdened with history, the very heart of her concerns as a woman of this century carrying the songs and silences of earlier centuries in her bones.

Carcanet publish HD's "Collected Poems 1912-1944" and her "Selected Poems", as well as "Tribute to Freud".

About the Author

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) is now acknowledged as a major Modernist, of the company of Eliot and Pound, Joyce and Lawrence. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1886 and moved to London in 1911, where she was one of the earliest Imagists. Her major works include "Trilogy" (1944-1946) and "Helen in Egypt" (1961). She died in 1961.

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