In 1913, Pound fostered H. D.'s career by issuing her verse in Poetry Magazine, under the pseudonym "H. D., Imagiste," and exhibiting her work in his anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). On her own, H. D. published Sea Garden (1916). When her husband went to war, she joined T. S. Eliot in editing the Egoist. The post–World War I period tried her stamina with grief over her brother Gilbert's death in combat, a miscarriage, her father's death, an affair with music critic Cecil Grey, and, in 1919, the painful birth of their daughter, Frances Perdita. About the time H. D. ended her marriage, she met a wealthy traveling companion, Annie Winnifred Ellerman, who named herself Bryher after one of the Scilly Islands. In 1920, H. D. and Bryher moved to Lake Geneva, which remained their home.
Mature verse colors H. D.'s collections: the life-affirming meditations in Hymen (1921), Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), and Collected Poems of H. D. (1925), the beginning of the poet's critical and popular success and literary independence. Subsequent publications display self-confidence and growing feminism: an experimental autobiography, HERmione (1927), a verse tragedy dramatically entitled Hippolytus Temporizes: A Play in Three Acts (1927), Red Roses for Bronze (1932), and a translation of Euripides's tragedy Ion (1937). Following Collected Poems (1940), she issued a pro-matriarchal trilogy — The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and Flowering of the Rod (1946) — and her last verse collection, Helen in Egypt (1961), an examination of necromancy through blended prose and epic poetry.
