"Words were her plague and words were her redemption." - Hilda Doolitle

Nele Azevedo, Melting Men

H.D.’s walk through the “city of ruin” excerpt:

we are powerless,
dust and powder fill our lungs
our bodies blunder...
  ...

we walk continually

on thin air
that thickens to a blind fog...

  ...

we know no rule
of procedure,

we are voyagers, discoverers
of the not-known

the unrecorded;
we have no map;

possibly we will reach haven,
heaven.

Born today H.D.'s life and work recapitulate the central themes of literary modernism: the emergence from Victorian norms and certainties, the entry into an age characterized by rapid technological change and the violence of two great wars, and the development of literary modes which reflected the disintegration of traditional symbolic systems and the mythmaking quest for new meanings. Within this modernist tradition, H.D.’s particular emphasis grew out of her perspective as a woman regarding the intersections of public events and private lives in the aftermath of World War I and in the increasingly ominous period culminating in the Atomic Age. 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.
source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/h-d