Hilda Doolittle's emergence on the pages of Poetry magazine in 1913 as "H. D., Imagiste" heralded the beginnings of a writer whose canon spans half a century and the genres of poetry, fiction, memoir, essay, drama, and translation. This achievement was firmly rooted in H. D.'s central participation in the imagist movement, a short-lived moment in literary history, but one whose experiments changed the course of modern poetry with its concept of the "image" and its advocacy of vers libre. (p. 1)

Sea Garden, published in 1916, was the poet's culmination of her early apprenticeship in London, and it won for her the reputation of being the best of the imagist poets. Her poems avoided the vague moralizing and sentimental mythologizing that the imagists deplored in much of the "cosmic" poetry of the late nineteenth century. They were crisp, precise, and absolutely without excess. The imagist emphasis on hard, classical...