Dickinson's poetic accomplishment was recognized from the moment her first volume appeared in 1890, but never has she enjoyed more acclaim than she does today. Once Thomas H. Johnson made her complete body of 1,775 poems available in his 1955 variorum edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, interest from all quarters soared. Readers immediately discovered a poet of immense depth and stylistic complexity whose work eludes categorization.

Dickinson, Emily (10 Dec. 1830-15 May 1886), poet, was born Emily Elizabeth Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts, the daughter of Edward Dickinson, an attorney, and Emily Norcross. The notation "At Home" that summed up her occupation on the certificate recording her death in that same town belies the drama of her inner, creative life even as it accurately reflects a reclusive existence spent almost entirely in the Dickinson Homestead. That home, built by her grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson, represented her family's ambition.

As in many of H.D.'s poems, voice, action, and objects here are treated as equal elements in a system, rather than as subordinate in syntactic or philosophical relation to one another. The oread, a nymph of the forest, demands of the sea an action which rises in crescendo from "whirl" to "splash" to "hurl," then settles into senescence with "cover." It is sexual, suicidal, and it connects the speaker to the sea in an intense, intimate manner.

When it was first published, another poem in which the sea is personified, "Oread," was attacked by the enemies of Imagism. They objected to its irregular pattern, and thought that because its single image was devoid of ethical significance it was suitable only to begin a poem and was not a poem in itself. But as Imagism triumphed, "Oread" became one of its showpieces. Critics agreed that in its six short lines H. D. had suggested the sea's thunder and its cleansing powers. The sea here is equated with an immense oread, a nymph of the mountains, whose violence is a purification.

Although mythology recounts Helen's heritage as the love child of the god Zeus, her abduction by Theseus when she was a child, Aphrodite's promise to give her to Paris as a bribe for the golden apple, and the heroic adventures of the men who fought then ten-year war, Helen’s own feelings and Greece’s reaction to her are not part of the myth. Hilda Doolittle has filled that gap in the brief but haunting poem, , "Helen." The tone of the poem seems bitter, concerned only with Helen's rejection by Greece, but a closer reading reveals an identification of Helen with Greece.

In an interesting departure, H. D. presents the title-character in the poem "Helen" as a suffering madonna victimized by the Greeks. The word "white" is used four times in the poem's eighteen lines, "wan" twice, and "cool" once. Helen's birth is purified: in the traditional myth, she was conceived when Zeus took the form of a swan and seduced Leda; the Helen in H. D.'s poem is "God's daughter, born of love." Furthermore, there is no reference to her infidelity and her part in causing the Trojan War. She appears as a kind of Joan of Arc (she is called the "maid") menaced by fierce warriors.

Perhaps her most characteristic imagist poem recreates Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in Greek mythology, whose abduction from her husband, Menelaus, by the Trojan prince Paris started the Trojan War. H. D.’s "Helen" seems a remote ideal like the Greek heroine, yet the view of her is as much from the inside as from the outside; she is seen as a woman who suffers for her beauty and is forced to endure the hostile glances of those who blame her for causing the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. "All Greece hates / the still eyes in the white face," H. D.

Stieglitz' experiments with combining the still life and the landscape are also reflected in Williams' work. The four flower studies he published in Sour Grapes (1921), "Daisy," "Primrose," "Queen Anne's Lace," and "Great Mullen," are especially interesting for their sense of scale. "Daisy," for example, moves from a rapid overview of "Spring . . . gone down in purple," "weeds . . .

"Queen-Anne's-Lace," from the 1921 Sour Grapes collection, is an early example of Williams' use of the Cubist model as a way to confuse two frames of reference—to subvert the hierarchy of tenor over vehicle in the structure of metaphor via the poem's enjambments: . . .

As in some of the poems of Whitman, a predominantly natural description enlists humanizing metaphorical elements. Is a woman's body actually "present" in the scene described?