Poetry
Sea Garden
Hilda Doolittle · 1916
Synopsis
Some thirty pieces, most of them very brief, in free verse. A sea rose, thin, battered, thrown onto the sand, is worth more there than a damp rose on its stem. A sea lily, cut by the sand and whipped by the wind, stands upright again. Hermes waits at the crossing of three roads, facing the dunes, near a stream and apple trees twisted by the sea wind; a chorus calls a huntress to the race; hazelnuts that have fallen, pomegranates and figs are carried to the god of the orchard.
Context
The volume appeared in London in 1916 from Constable. Two of its pieces, Hermes of the Ways and Orchard, then titled Priapus, had appeared in January 1913 in the Chicago magazine Poetry, the group's first publication, under the signature H.D., Imagiste, which Pound had added in his own hand in 1912, according to tradition in the tea room of the British Museum. The group's principles were published only in March 1913, in the same magazine. The poem Oread, of 1915, is not in the volume, and her later work would go far beyond the Imagist label.
Who it is for
A short collection, to be taken slowly and poem by poem. Nothing in it is explained and the titles carry part of the meaning. Only one French translation, by Auxeméry.
Prizes and reception
Her first collection, which established her among the young Imagist poets; she is sometimes regarded as the first of them.
Sources for this page 8
The pages consulted to check this page.