Hugh Kenner once said that to identify H. D. (Hilda Doolittle [1886–1961]) as an imagist poet would be the same as to select a few of the shortest pieces in Harmonium (1923) and make them stand for the life's work of Wallace Stevens. However, as one would not wish lightly to dismiss “The Snowman,” “Fabliau of Florida,” or “The Anecdote of the Jar,” neither would one want to slight the importance for the literary history of American modernism of H. D.'s emergence as “H. D., Imagiste” on the pages of Harriet Monroe's Poetry: A Review of Verse, in January 1913. Although a very young Hilda Doolittle had already used the initials as a signature (to sign an early letter to William Carlos Williams), it was Ezra Pound's privilege (according to H. D. herself in End to Torment [1979, written in 1958]) to make them famous by thus presenting the author of the three poems which he, in his capacity of foreign correspondent, sent off to the little magazine in Chicago in October 1912.

This graphic gesture – Hilda Doolittle reinscribed and thus reinvented as H. D. – can be seen as a dramatization of the “impersonal,” “objective” poetics of modernism, which Pound and Eliot were soon to conceptualize and theorize. Pound, H. D., and Eliot were then living as expatriates in London, a city teeming with little magazines, poetry readings and exchanges, poetic gatherings in tea-and-bun-shops or at The Poetry Book Shop of Harold Monro (Poetry Review). Pound, always in the limelight of the poetic scene in London, was determined to influence the course of American poetry in the United States by getting the avant-garde work of his friends and his own published in poetry journals back home.