H. D. always wrote her own personal and psychological dilemma against and within the political turmoil of the twentieth century, the toils of love enmeshed in the convulsions of war. Her marriage to and separation from Richard Aldington turn on World War I, and that concatenation of private and public trauma stands behind the poems of Sea Garden, which sum up the Imagist concision of her first phase. The sequences of Trilogy, written through the London blitzes of World War II, usher in the longer, multivalent and more associative poems of her later years. The travail of aging and illness in her last years did not issue in the stoic silence which made Pound leave incomplete his life's work in the Cantos, but instead, as with William Carlos Williams, made for a final and climactic efflorescence of creative energy. The results were Helen in Egypt, published in 1961 almost...