The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.

Hello, we begin today with a quote about Hilda Doolittle, the modernist poet who is also known as

HD.

Quote, HD read and wrote about an impressively wide range of topics, gender and sexuality, nature and the environment,

religion and mysticism, psychoanalysis, ancient civilizations,

the history of war and imperialism, the lives of artists, silent film, and literature.

She read French, German, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek.

She led a fascinating parapetetic life. At least half a dozen nations

she called home, England, the United States, Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Italy.

She went to Greece with the sexologist Havlock Ellis.

She was in Egypt when King Tut's tomb was opened.

She lived in London through two world wars.

Man Ray photographed her twice.

Her famed beauty was typically described as strange.

She was quasi engaged to Ezra Pound and ended a short-lived friendship with D.H. Lawrence

over his sexist views.

She was an analysis and patient of Sigmund Freud. Her work ethic could only be described as Puritan.

She was loyal at times to a fault. She starred in avant-garde films. She was an amateur astrologer with an expansive,

syncretic, ever-evolving, hermetic notion of spirituality. She was extraordinarily well read, her library vast, but in stressful times she

binged on lesbian romances and police procedurals.

For a time she raised pet monkeys.

End quote.

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