English department pays homage to H.D.

She was born Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1886 but she came to be known by her pen name—H.D.—and for her poems, novels and memoirs.

H.D.’s poetry and prose helped define modernism in the early twentieth century. Her innovative and experimental work tried to make sense of a world transformed and traumatized by two world wars.

H.D. wrote about her Moravian heritage in two memoirs, The Gift and Tribute to Freud, with whom she studied in the 1930s, and in a novel, The Mystery. In Helen in Egypt, she examined epic poems from a feminist point of view.

Last spring, H.D. posthumously received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at Lehigh’s 147th commencement ceremony.

This week, H.D. will be the focus of a three-day international conference hosted by Lehigh’s department of English. The event is part of Lehigh’s sesquicentennial celebration. Fifty scholars, from across the United States and Canada, and from England and Greece are scheduled to participate.

“H.D. and Feminist Poetics” begins at 6:30 p.m. Thursday (Sept. 17) with a reading in the Scheler Humanities Forum of Linderman Library by Nathaniel Mackey, winner of the 2015 Bollingen Prize in Poetry. Previous recipients of the award, which is given every two years by Yale University’s Beinecke Library, include Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Robert Penn Warren.

The conference continues Friday and Saturday (Sept. 18-19) at the Hotel Bethlehem with two plenary addresses, several roundtables, and nearly a dozen panel discussions. The full conference program includes the following events:

•    “A Tour of H.D.’s Bethlehem” led by Seth Moglen, associate professor of English and co-director of the South Side Initiative
•    A plenary address Friday by Susan Stanford Friedman of the University of Wisconsin titled “Emergences of H.D.: Then and Now, Here and There”
•    A plenary address Saturday by Cynthia Hogue of Arizona State University titled “Notes Towards a Reading of H.D.'s Poetics of d’Espére”
•    Four panel discussions Friday on the topics of War, Spirituality, Psychoanalysis and Classics
•    A roundtable discussion Friday on H.D. and Biography
•    Six panel discussions Saturday on the topics of Moravians, New Translations, Imagism, H.D. and Others, Trilogy, and Bodies and Embodiment
•    A special session Saturday on H.D. in the 21st Century
•    A visit to H.D.’s grave at Nisky Hill Cemetery in Bethlehem

In addition to Moglen, nine members of Lehigh’s department of English are participating in the conference: Elizabeth Fifer, Michael Kramp, Jenny Hyest, Amardeep Singh, Scott Gordon, David J. Fine, Jenna Lay, Ed Simon and Lyndon Dominique.