H.D. in the context of "The Transatlantic Review"

The Rive Gauche (French pronunciation: [riv ɡoʃ]; Left Bank) is the southern bank of the river Seine in Paris. Here the river flows roughly westward, splitting the city into two parts. When facing downstream, the southern bank is to the left, whereas the northern bank (or Rive Droite) is to the right.

The Rive Gauche is associated with artists, writers, and philosophers including Colette, Margaret Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach, Erik Satie, Kay Boyle, Bryher, Caresse Crosby, Nancy Cunard, H.D., Janet Flanner, Jane Heap, Maria Jolas, Mina Loy, Henry Miller, Adrienne Monnier, Anaïs Nin, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Renee Vivien, Edith Wharton Pablo Picasso, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Henri Matisse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, and dozens of members of the great artistic community at Montparnasse. The phrase implies a sense of bohemianism, counterculture, and creativity. Some of its famous streets are the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Boulevard Saint-Michel, the Rue de Vaugirard, and Rue Bonaparte.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and The Cantos (c. 1915–1962).

Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as H.D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold".

Jane Ellen Harrison (9 September 1850 – 15 April 1928) was a British classical scholar and linguist. With Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, Harrison is one of the founders of modern studies in Ancient Greek religion and mythology. She applied 19th-century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of ancient Greek religion in ways that have become standard. She has also been credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a 'career academic'. Harrison argued for women's suffrage but thought she would never want to vote herself. Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, later second wife of Sir Francis Darwin, was Jane Harrison's best friend from her student days at Newnham, and during the period from 1898 to Ellen's death in 1903. The depth and influence of Harrison’s friendship with Eugénie Sellers Strong—ended by a dramatic breech in the 1890s—is explored in a monograph by Mary Beard: after their breakup Sellers became an influential authority on the material culture of Imperial Rome, while Harrison’s work dug deeper and deeper into the primitive ritual origins of Greek drama. Though moving in different directions chronologically, in terms of their focus, the women appear otherwise as doppelgängers of one another in their concerns, style and characteristic forms of argument deriving from an approach that became known as classical anthropology. Harrison’s Prolegomena to Greek Religion had a compelling and inspirational impact on the later artworks of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Hilda Doolittle and her scholarly legerdemain was formative to the group of classicists known as the Cambridge ritualists.

Annie Winifred Ellerman (2 September 1894 – 28 January 1983), known by the pen name Bryher, was an English novelist, poet, memoirist, magazine editor, and a member of the Ellerman ship-owning family.

She was a major figure of the international set in Paris in the 1920s, using her fortune to help many struggling writers. With her lover H.D. and the Scottish writer Kenneth Macpherson, she launched the film magazine Close Up, which introduced Sergei Eisenstein’s work to British viewers. From her home in Switzerland, she helped to evacuate Jews from Nazi Germany, and then became an historical novelist.

Kenneth Macpherson (27 March 1902 – 14 June 1971) was a Scottish-born novelist, photographer, critic, and film-maker, the son of Scottish painter John 'Pop' Macpherson and Clara Macpherson, and descended from six generations of artists. It is only in recent years that Macpherson's contribution to cinematography has come to be recognised with the re-discovery of his work, which, though limited in output, was far ahead of its time, both in subject matter and cinematic technique. In his work with the Pool Group (1927–1933), which he co-founded with Bryher and H.D., Macpherson also established the influential film journal Close Up.

Close Up was an influential literary magazine devoted to film, published by the Pool Group between 1927 and 1933. "It was the brain child of Kenneth Macpherson, a young man of independent means, not a little talent, and quite a lot of personal charm". The monthly magazine, founded at the group's 'headquarters' in Territet, Switzerland, would be dedicated to "independent cinema and cinema from around the world". The first issue was published in July 1927 and described itself on the front cover as an "international magazine devoted to film art". Macpherson was editor-in-chief, with Bryher as assistant editor, and Hilda Doolittle ("H.D.") and Oswell Blakeston making regular contributions.

The publication was truly international with correspondents reporting on productions worldwide, with major literary and cinematic figures contributing articles on the latest film theory (René Crevel, Dorothy Richardson, Sergei Eisenstein, Hans Sachs, Harry Potamkin) and advertising revenue coming from Paris, Berlin, and New York.

Robert Edward Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet and a devotee of Hilda "H.D." Doolittle and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition of Pound, Williams and Lawrence. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.

Richard Aldington (born Edward Godfree Aldington; 8 July 1892 – 27 July 1962) was an English writer and poet. He was an early associate of the Imagist movement. His 50-year writing career produced "143 separate titles, including poetry, literary criticism, fiction, essays, anthologies, biographies, translations, and introductions. In addition, he published reviews of over 1,350 separate books, published hundreds of other articles, and wrote an immense quantity of letters, of which approximately 8,000 have been located since his death." He edited The Egoist, a literary journal, and wrote for The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Criterion, and Poetry. His biography, Wellington (1946), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Aldington was married to the poet Hilda Doolittle, known by her initials H.D., from 1913 to 1938. His acquaintances included writers T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Lawrence Durrell, C. P. Snow, and others. He championed H.D. as the major poetic voice of the Imagist movement and helped her work gain international notice.