The American poet H. D. (1886-1961) is increasingly being recognized as a key figure in the shaping of Anglo-American modernism, and this study attempts to emphasize her position, against the well-established claims of writers such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The study is grounded in questions of sexuality, gender and the nature of subjectivity and H. D.'s interest in Hellenism. The development of a homoerotic strand within her distinctively modernist poetics comes together in Collecott's central concept of "sapphic modernism."

Diana Collecott proposes that Sappho's presence in H. D.'s work is as significant as that of Homer in Pound's and of Dante in Eliot's.