-Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle

The Bethlehem-born poet and novelist H.D. (her father taught astronomy at Lehigh University) was a central figure in transatlantic literary modernism during the early twentieth century. While the poems that she wrote were very different from Whitman’s—ranging from short, imagistic pieces to densely allusive works of personal mythology—she acknowledged Whitman as “a cosmic spirit . . . ridiculously and truly ‘American’.” But like H.D. herself, who spent much of her life abroad in relationships with both men and women, Whitman was not exclusively tied to the United States. As she wrote, “Walt flung his exotic so-called sex profusion out toward the hinterland,” heedless of whether his light crossed national borders in the process: “It simply goes on shining.”