The development of H. D.'s increasingly complex and resonant texts is best understood when placed in the context of other important modernists, many of whom she knew intimately and all of whom she read avidly--especially poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and the Sitwells: and novelists such as D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Colette, May Sinclair, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner. Within this modernist tradition, H. D.'s particular emphasis grew out of her perspective as a woman regarding the intersections of public events and private lives in the aftermath of World War I and in the increasingly ominous period culminating in the Atomic Age. Love and war, birth and death are the central concerns of her work, in which she reconstituted gender, language, and myth to serve her search for the underlying patterns ordering and uniting consciousness and culture.
Following in the footsteps of Henry James and Mary Cassatt and paralleling the paths of Pound, Eliot, and Stein, H. D. lived as an expatriate in England and Europe from 1911 until her death in 1961.
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