Welcome to the Lehigh Valley Landmarks with Leon podcast series, celebrating 250 years of independence. I'm your host, Rachel Leon. Since being elected in 2022 and serving as Vice President of Bethlehem City Council, I'm humbled by the opportunity to serve the diverse communities that make up our great city. But to understand where we're going, we need to understand our past. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story about the 250 years that made the Lehigh Valley and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, known as the Christmas City, as we explore historic landmarks.
Not many women have their epitaph published thirty years prior to their death, but American modernist poet Hilda Doolittle, better known as H.D. wasn’t like most women. At the age of 45 she published the poem “Epitaph” in her 1931 collection Red Roses for Bronze.
In Nisky Hill Cemetery - off of East Church Street, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. - you can find the family plot.
Hilda Doolittle’s headstone reads: “So you may say, Greek flower / Greek Ecstasy reclaims for everyone who died following intricate song’s lost measure.”
The headstone is decorated with seashells to celebrate “Sea Garden,” her first collection of poems published in 1916 and considered a definitive work of imagism.
The family home stood on the south east side of the Bethlehem Area Public Library on Church Street.
Hilda was the sixth child and the only daughter raised in a highly disciplined and organized structured Moravian community. Hellen Wolle, her mother’s family were Moravian’s committed to worship and filling their home with church hymns and candle-lit rituals. Charles, her father, was an astronomy professor at Lehigh University.
At the age of ten Charles relocated the family to Upper Darby.
H.D. met poet Ezra Pound as a teenager in 1901 and became a lifelong friend. Although she declined a marriage proposal he played a formative role in her development as a writer.
She enrolled at Bryn Mawr College in 1905 to study Greek literature. There she had an affair with poet Marianne Moore and poet William Carlos Williams who asked for her hand in marriage.
Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagism group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound.
She was published by The English Review, The Transatlantic Review, Poetry magazine, published Helen in Egypt and numerous Greek translations as well as worked as an associate literary editor of the Egoist from 1916-1917.
In 1913 she married Imagist poet Richard Aldington. Two years after their marriage both would engage in affairs. In 1916 Frances Perdita was born and fathered by Cecil Gray.
After separating from Richard in 1918, H.D. met novelist Annie Winifred Ellerman, known as Bryher. The two remained romantic partners until H.D.’s death. Throughout the 1920s H.D.’s writings focused on lesbian romanticism and mythology.
In the 1930s she and Bryher moved to Vienna to seek psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud to understand sexuality, identity and trauma, she also acted in the avant-garde film Close Up.
In 1939 she divorced Richard Aldington and she and Bryher moved to London during WWII.
From the ashes of the London Blitz, H.D. penned her childhood memories of her idyllic days in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to honor her Moravian heritage in a book titled The Gift.
H.D. died in Zürich, Switzerland on September 27, 1961. It has become customary for visitors to H.D. 's grave at Nisky Hill Cemetery to leave a seashell as a token of remembrance.
Special thanks to the Lehigh University Libraries Special Collections, the Bryn Mawr College Library Archives and Manuscripts and the Bethlehem Area Public Library.
