During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention.

Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama.

's poetic style from World War II until her death pivoted towards complex long poems on esoteric and pacifist themes.

[2] Following a reappraisal by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s, the significance of her late long poems and prose works was increasingly recognized, and she has come to be understood as a central figure in the history of modernist literature.

[3] Her father, Charles, was professor of astronomy at Lehigh University in Bethlehem,[4] and her mother, Helen (née Wolle),[5] was a member of the Moravian brotherhood.

When her father was appointed professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania to take charge of the Flower Observatory in Philadelphia,[6] the family moved to Upper Darby.

[12] In 1907, Pound gave her Hilda's Book, a handmade vellum binding of twenty-five of his earliest love poems, which he dedicated to her.

[18] Like most modernists in different artistic fields, she sought to "make it new",[19] which they accomplished by incorporating free verse, the brevity of the tanka and haiku forms, and the removal of unnecessary verbiage.

told him that she found "Hilda Doolittle" to be an old fashioned and "quaint" name; he suggested the signature H.D., an abbreviation she kept for the remainder of her career.

[25] These early poems are informed by her reading of Classical Greek literature, especially of Sappho,[26] an interest she shared with Aldington and Pound.

the "truest Imagist" but dismissed her early work as "petty poetry", denoting "either poverty of imagination or needlessly excessive restraint".

[38] In July 1918, she met the wealthy English novelist Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) in Cornwall, and the two began a relationship.

[44] In it, she speaks of poets (including herself) as belonging to a kind of elite group of visionaries with the power to "turn the whole tide of human thought".

The following cycles, "HERmione", "Bid Me to Live", "Paint It Today", and "Asphodel" are largely autobiographical and preoccupied with the development of the female artist and the conflict between heterosexual and lesbian desire.

The novellas Kora and Ka and The Usual Star from the Borderline cycle were published in 1933, followed by Pilate's Wife, Mira-Mare and Nights.

World War I left her feeling shattered; she lost her brother in action, her father died in reaction to the loss of his son, her husband was traumatized by combat, and she believed that the shock at hearing of the sinking the RMS Lusitania indirectly caused the miscarriage of her child.

[63] She began the Trilogy series in 1942, comprising three long, unrhyming, and complex volumes of poems: The Walls do not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946).

[64] The opening lines of The Walls do not Fall clearly and immediately signal her break with her earlier work:[65] An incident here and there, and rails gone (for guns) from your (and my) old town square.

[66] In the late 1950s, she underwent further treatment with the psychoanalyst Erich Heydt, who supported her while she wrote End to Torment, a memoir of her relationship with Pound.

[62] The book takes as its starting points her love for a man 30 years her junior and the line "so slow is the rose to open" from Pound's Canto 106.

"Sagesse", which she wrote in bed having broken her hip in a fall, serves as a coda to Trilogy, being partly written in the voice of a young female Blitz survivor who finds herself living in fear of the atom bomb.

[77] "Winter Love" was written during the same period as End to Torment and uses as narrator the Homeric figure of Penelope to restate the material of the memoir in poetic form.

[82] In 1972, Hugh Kenner wrote that assigning her as just an Imagist poet was similar to evaluating "five of the shortest pieces in Harmonium [as equal to] the life's work of Wallace Stevens".

She worried about being perceived merely as their private muse, which she feared affected her public image and standing as a poet and prominent intellectual in her own right.

[86] Female objectification is explored in "HER", where she writes of "a classic dilemma for woman: the necessity to choose between being a muse to another or being an artist oneself".

[86] Although Pound was a lifelong champion, a number of other early Imagists, including Aldington and Lawrence, attempted to diminish her importance and consign her to a minor role.

[88] Specifically, critics such as Friedman (1981), Janice Robertson (1982) and Rachel DuPlessis (1986) began to challenge the standard view of English-language literary modernism as based on only the work of male writers, and gradually restored H.D.

's mid-century poems, like those of Gwendolyn Brooks, anticipate second-wave feminism, and explore issues raised in Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book The Second Sex.

positions Helen as "the protagonist, instead of the pawn", in such a way as to counter the "conservative and often misogynistic" tendencies which Hughes finds in the modernism of Pound and T. S.

's daughter Perdita was involved in breaking codes at Bletchley Park, and later worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency.