Visions and Ecstasies: Selected Essays

Born Hilda Doolittle, H.d. (1886–1961) was an American poet and novelist associated with Imagism, an avant-garde literary movement that emerged in London during the early twentieth century. Her first and perhaps best- known collection of poetry, Sea Garden (1916), exemplifies the precise imagery and sharp language favored by Imagism and her contemporaries Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. H.D.’s writing was often deeply personal, merging her unstable private life, marred as it was by frequent illness and loss, with the evocative images and stories of the ancient world. Together with her companion Bryher, she traveled throughout Europe, in particular to Greece, and to Egypt, sites that would continue to inspire her late into her life and have a profound impact on her final poems, such as the revisionary epic Helen in Egypt(1961). Though somewhat overshadowed by her male contemporaries in historical and critical ac- counts of modernist movements, H.D. is one of the most important and inimitable writers of her time.

Michael Green is a Wolfson Scholar and PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art at University College London. He works within the intersections of art, literature, and psychoanalysis, and his current research engages with how H.D.’s writings have been used in contemporary art practices from the 1970s to the present.

Dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes the ekphrasis series is part of David Zwirner Books’s ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.

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