End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound

By: Hilda Doolittle

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Synopsis: End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound is the deeply personal journal kept by the poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle. 1886-1961) in 1958, the year Ezra Pound was released from St. Elizabeth's in Washington, D.C., and returned to Italy. H. D., hospitalized in Switzerland from a fall, was urged to put down on paper, once and for all, her memories of Pound, which reached back to 1905, when she was a freshman at Bryn Mawr and he a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. They had been engaged for a period, and what began as a brief romance developed into a lifetime's friendship and collaboration in poetry. Throughout the reminiscence runs H. D's conviction that her life and Pound's had been irrevocably entwined since those early days when they had walked together in the Pennsylvania woods and he wrote for her verse after William Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Chaucer. Twenty-five of these poems, handbound in vellum by Pound and called "Hilda's Book," are published here for the first time as an epilogue to this important and moving document.