Within the Walls and What Do I Love?

“These two hard-to-come-by texts reveal that the H.D. we know—the poet of exquisite, erudite, allusive imagist or modernist poems—chose to live through the experience of WWII London and to share with her fellow Londoners the hardships and anxieties of a city under attack.”—Demetres Tryphonopoulos, editor of Majic Ring

“Fascinating reading. Debo’s introduction and precise scholarly edition are not simply useful but will also change our minds about some of the other post-war works now available.”—Cynthia Hogue, coeditor of The Sword Went Out to Sea

This volume presents two rare works by the modernist writer H.D.: Within the Walls, a collection of fourteen short stories, and What Do I Love?, a set of three long poems. Written during World War II in London, where H.D. chose to stay despite offers of refuge in the United States, the stories and poems recount her experiences during the Blitz. These texts capture the essence of war-torn London from the perspective of a woman with her boots on the ground.

Annette Debo’s nuanced introduction sets the cultural scene for these works. She positions the literature in three contexts: H.D.’s personal life, the story of women civilians at war, and the international history of World War II. Debo helps us comprehend a time and place that transformed “H.D. Imagiste” into the bold war writer evinced in this volume and opens our eyes to the impact of these war experiences on H.D.’s better known works.

H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) was an American writer who exerted enormous influence on modernist poetry and prose. Annette Debo is professor of English at Western Carolina University. She is the author of The American H.D. and the coeditor of Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose.