H.D., Richard Aldington, and <i>The Egoist</i> as Imagist Autobiography

ABSTRACT Under the leadership of assistant editors Richard Aldington and H.D., The Egoist magazine served as one of the major outlets for imagist writers throughout World War I. The Egoist in this period veers away from the philosophically political direction of Dora Marsden’s earlier magazines, The Freewoman and The New Freewoman, while at the same time it avoids the poetically apolitical editorial strategy adopted by T. S. Eliot after 1917. Both H.D. and Aldington encode their autobiographical struggles and debate their poetic response to war within the imagist experimentation they promote and publish in the magazine’s pages. Analyzing H.D.’s and Aldington’s paired poetic contributions to The Egoist from 1915 to 1917, this article fills significant gaps in our understanding of The Egoist and its contributors throughout the early years of both imagism and World War I. While Aldington often demonstrates the limits of literature to bear witness to trauma, H.D.’s contributions are personal and dialogic, voicing both male and female speakers as part of a broader imagist argument about modernism, war, and survival.