What a melancholy thing it is to have to admit that one of our national
traits so often interferes with our appreciation of the fine arts, and
therefore with the pleasure and profit to be derived from them! As a
nation, we are dreadfully impressed by noise. The loud and compelling,
even if the blatant, is sure to attract our attention. It is as though
we were tone-deaf to all instruments save those of percussion, and
colour-blind to all except the primary colours.
This is a particularly unsatisfactory condition, as we are really of a
very welcoming temper. We are as anxious to make friends in art as in
life. We have no quarrel with originality; on the contrary, it is
decidedly pleasing to us. But our sympathies are bounded by our
capacities, and our capacities are to a great extent limited to the
perception of loud tones and crude colours. To teach the public to hear
semi tones and see half-shades, perhaps that is one of the functions of
the Imagist poets.
I suppose it is this preoccupation with what Walter Scott used to call
“the big, bow-wow style,” which has kept Richard Aldington’s work from
being as well understood here as it is in England. The very delicacy of
it; its elusiveness, in which suggestions appear and disappear like a
blowing mist; its faint, gradually changing colour; all these things
confuse the average American poetry lover. While a few people find in
Mr. Aldington’s work poetry of a most exquisite and stimulating kind,
the great mass of readers turn away bewildered.
This is inconceivable to me. How is it that we do not notice that a man
is standing beside us unless he digs us in the ribs with an aggressive
elbow? Our own country-woman, who writes under the pen-name of H. D.,
has had to contend with much of the same partial understanding, and it
remained for an Englishman, Mr. Aldington himself, to write an
explanation and appreciation of her work in an American magazine—this
magazine. It is time that an American should explain to her countrymen
the work of the Englishman, who is Richard Aldington.
Water and poetry have a quality in common. They both have a way of
seeping—seeping, and without apparent flow, arriving. We are constantly
finding fault with American publishers for permitting English firms to
bring out the first books of our authors; it is to the honour of America
that Richard Aldington’s first book is to appear in the autumn, with the
imprint of an American house.
Indeed, in speaking of the non-understanding of the mass of American
readers and reviewers, I must add the paradox that the minority here is
quicker to perceive excellence than the people of any other country. It
is our own magazine _Poetry_, with its far-seeing and daring editor, who
first introduced Mr. Aldington to a considerable public, and her lead
was quickly followed by THE LITTLE REVIEW; an American firm, the Boni’s,
printed a number of his poems in an Anthology: _Des Imagistes_; and
another American firm, Messrs. Houghton Mifflin, printed others in _Some
Imagist Poets_. So Mr. Aldington’s work has seeped little by little to
where we can look at it as a reflecting lake. More sputtering brooks of
poetry have brawled away and disappeared, but Mr. Aldington’s output
lies placid and arresting before us.
What is the quality of this work which makes it at once eluding and
enduring? I think it is stark, unsentimental preoccupation with beauty.
Mr. Aldington is in love with beauty. “Not,” to quote Leigh Hunt, “in
the little present-making style, with baskets of new fruit and pots of
roses, but with consuming passion.” There is nothing pretty about this
poetry; it is not prettiness, but beauty, that the poet is after.
This naked beauty Mr. Aldington found in the Greeks. One feels that his
youth was passed in a kind of painful homesickness, the nostalgia of a
beauty which he could not then see about him. Greek poetry and Italian
landscape gave him ease, and, solaced and flowering, his first work was
under their influence.
I do not know which of Mr. Aldington’s poems first saw the light of day
in _Poetry_, and I have not the volumes here to refer to. But the first
collection of his poems in _Des Imagistes_ shows this preoccupation with
Greek themes. All of the poems are Greek in feeling, many of them have
Greek titles and are perfectly Greek in content. Take this one, for
instance: