Writing under the pen name H.D., her work as a writer traversed five decades of the 20th century, and integrates work in a variety of genres. She is known primarily as a poet, but she also wrote novels, memoirs, and essays and did several translations from Greek.

Her work is unfailingly unique and original, both indicating and contributing to the avant-garde milieu that oversaw the arts in London and Paris until the end of World War II.

Immersed for decades in the intellectual crosscurrents of modernism, psychoanalysis, syncretist mythologies, and feminism, H.D. created a unique voice and conception that sought to bring meaning to the fragmented shards of a war-torn culture.

Today she is read widely and admired for her innovative and experimental approaches to poetry.

H.D.'s life and work summarize the central themes of literary modernism: the emergence of Victorian norms and certainties, and the entry into an age characterized by rapid technological change. 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.

Her writings have served as a model for several more recent women poets working in the modernist and post-modernist traditions, including the New York School poet Barbara Guest, the Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov, the Black Mountain poet Hilda Morley and the Language poet Susan Howe. Her influence is not limited to female poets, and many male writers, including Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, have acknowledged their debt. The Dutch poet H.C. ten Berge wrote his 2008 'Het vertrapte mysteries in memory of H.D.

Source: The Poetry Foundation