Helen in Egypt

Hilda Doolittle

jan 1974 · New Directions Paperbook Libri 380 · New Directions Publishing

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The fabulous beauty of Helen of Troy is legendary. But some say that Helen was never in Troy, that she had been conveyed by Zeus to Egypt, and that Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion. A fifty-line fragment by the poet Stesichorus of Sicily (c. 640-555 B.C.), what survives of his Pallinode, tells us almost all we know of this other Helen, and from it H. D. wove her book-length poem. Yet Helen in Egypt is not a simple retelling of the Egyptian legend but a recreation of the many myths surrounding Helen, Paris, Achilles, Theseus, and other figures of Greek tradition, fused with the mysteries of Egyptian hermeticism.

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Hilda Doolittle was born in September 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is a poet and a novelist known as being a member of the poetry group avant-garde Imagists who believed in writing about what they chose. This later lead to her writings on modernism. She moved to London in 1911 where she met Ezra Pound who encouraged her writing. Her poetry was published in the English Review and the Transatlantic Review. Her work often borrowed images from classical Greek literature to evoke a particular feeling in the reader. In 1911 she sailed to Europe and met Richard Aldington - a poet whop would help her in her career and along with Pound the three poets became known as the "three original Imagists". Pound gave her the nickname H.D. Imagiste and it stuck. Some of her poetry collections are Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definition. She also wrote several books such as "Hermione" and "The Gift".