Mar
17
“An important chapter in the history of Anglo-American poetry began at a Halloween party in suburban Philadelphia in 1901. Hilda Doolittle, aged fifteen, and Ezra Pound, just turned sixteen, met there for the first time. A close relationship began a few years later and lasted, with many intermissions, for over half a troubled century, until de death of H.D. in 1961. It began as a friendship and adolescent love marked by erotic passion, became an engagement to marry that was broken, and passed through successive phases of collaboration, alienation, betrayal, filial affection, distrust, and pity to end in final reconciliation. As mature poets, the two went different ways, but they remained conscious of each other’s work, sometimes agreeing, sometimes quarrelling, and sometimes responding to each other’s writing. Each was an active figure in the imaginative life of the other, and each appears in the work of the other, sometimes as a prominent subject or stylistic influence, and sometimes as an obscure responding echo”
Winter Love, by Jacob Korg
