“No, my poetry was not dead but it was built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano.”

Describing creativity surviving around the remains of profound emotional upheaval · Memoir, End to Torment

• Creativity
• Memory
• Poetry

“No answer was final. The very answer held something of death, of finality, of Dead Sea fruit.”

Resisting explanations that close down further questioning and discovery · Memoir, Tribute to Freud

• Discovery
• Mind
• Truth

“I had never heard of vers libre until I was discovered by Ezra Pound.”

Recalling that her early poetic experiments preceded her knowledge of formal literary labels · Autobiographical recollection

• Influence
• Originality
• Poetry

“The initials, 'H.D.,' had no identity attached; they could have been pure spirit. But with this I'm embodied.”

Reflecting on the freedom and mystery afforded by her literary initials · Autobiographical essay, H.D. by Delia Alton

• Identity
• Privacy
• Writing

“I have all faith in my work. I feel my work is beautiful, I have a deep faith in it, an absolute faith.”

Expressing an unusually unequivocal confidence in the value of her writing · Letter to John Cournos, 1916

• Creativity
• Faith
• Writing

“Memory is the mother, begetter of all drama, idea, music, science or song.”

Presenting memory as the source from which creative and intellectual life emerges · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

• Art
• Creativity
• Memory

“Maybe this last terrible bout of most personal and intimate view of suffering will cleanse the human psyche.”

Hoping that profound suffering might lead humanity towards psychological renewal · Letter to May Sarton, 3 February 1945

• Hope
• Humanity
• Suffering

“I think I did get what I was looking for from life and art.”

A late-life expression of fulfilment in both experience and artistic endeavour · Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson

• Art
• Gratitude
• Life

“My bat-like thought-wings would beat painfully in that sudden searchlight.”

Capturing the discomfort of having hidden regions of the mind suddenly illuminated · Memoir, Tribute to Freud

• Fear
• Mind
• Understanding

“Maybe the loss of Ezra left a vacuum; anyway, Frances filled it like a blue flame.”

A vivid recollection of how one intense relationship followed another · Memoir, End to Torment

• Loss
• Love
• Memory

“Sappho has become for us a name, an abstraction as well as a pseudonym for poignant human feeling.”

Reflecting on how a poet can become an enduring embodiment of human emotion · Essay, The Wise Sappho

• Emotion
• Influence
• Poetry

“Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought.”

Expressing faith in the transformative power of receptive and creative minds · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

• Change
• Creativity
• Mind

“Though I love music I cannot write within earshot of any instrument.”

An intriguing distinction between his love of music and the silence required for writing · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Music
• Silence
• Writing

“Georgian Poetry, with my three excluded, contains, I think, the best poems of the century.”

Offers both generous praise of his contemporaries and a modest aside about himself · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Criticism
• Humility
• Poetry

“I burned many copybooks which contained fugitive pieces of my own because I thought it were better for them to die young and be happy than live to be reviled.”

A witty description of ruthless self-editing and dissatisfaction with early work · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Criticism
• Humour
• Writing

“For a long time I did little but criticise and rearrange my books, separating, as it were, the sheep from the goats.”

Reading critically became part of his education as a writer · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Books
• Criticism
• Learning

“Shelley was innocent of such sins and poor Keats never heard of them.”

His criticism gives way to warm admiration for Shelley and Keats · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Criticism
• Influence
• Poetry

“Tennyson was too conventional for my taste and nearly always spoiled his work with a prologue or an epilogue full of loud bombast or conceit.”

A strikingly forthright judgement on one of the major Victorian poets · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Convention
• Criticism
• Style

“The poems of the former which had erstwhile pleased me seemed too full of colour, too full of metaphor and often too disconnected.”

Shows Ledwidge developing definite ideas about poetic restraint and coherence · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Criticism
• Metaphor
• Style

“I began to pick faults with Longfellow and Tennyson.”

Marks the transition from youthful admiration to independent critical judgement · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Criticism
• Growth
• Poetry

“But the poems of Keats and his sad life appealed to me most.”

Identifies Keats as the poet whose work and fate affected him most deeply · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Influence
• Poetry
• Sorrow

“I longed to see the Italy of Shelley and the Greece of Byron.”

Literary admiration transformed distant countries into places of imaginative pilgrimage · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Influence
• Poetry
• Travel

“I thirsted for travel and adventure.”

A simple expression of the wanderlust that accompanied his attachment to home · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Discovery
• Longing
• Travel

“I turned especially to the Elizabethans and the ballads that came before the great Renaissance.”

Identifies traditions that particularly attracted him as a developing poet · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Influence
• Poetry
• Tradition