Introduction: Sharing the Image

Throughout her career, H.D. remained intensely aware of the negative effects of male objectification on female poetic identity. Several of her critics and biographers have recounted how during the early stages of her poetic career, H.D. served as a muse figure for the primarily male Imagist circle, her striking presence inspiring works by Richard Aldington, William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence and John Cournos, among others. This objectification began in her relationship with Ezra Pound, to whom she was briefly engaged and who characterized her as a mythical ‘Dryad’ in ‘Hilda's, Book’ (1905–7). When H.D. began to write her own poems, Pound cast himself as the impresario of her talent, coining the name ‘H.D. Imagiste’ during a meeting at the British Museum in 1912.

In her fiction and autobiographical writings, H.D. proudly acknowledges the role of her male ‘initiators’ in shaping her career. However, she also problematizes such a dynamic. For example, when recounting these events in her autobiographical novel HER (written c. 1927), H.D. focuses on ‘a classic dilemma for woman: the necessity to choose between being a muse for another and being an artist oneself’. In the novel, George Lowndes (based on Pound) threatens Her's, identity as an artist by turning her into an object: ‘He wanted Her, but he wanted a Her that he called decorative’.