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: Bromios The withered bonds are broken. The waxed reeds and the double pipe Clamour about me; The hot wind swirls Through the red pine trunks. Io! the fauns and the satyrs. The touch of their shagged curled fur And blunt horns! They have wine in heavy craters Painted black and red; Wine to splash on her white body. Io! She shrinks from the cold shower— Afraid, afraid! Let the Maenads break through the myrtles And the boughs of the rohododaphnai. Let them tear the quick deers’ flesh. Ah, the cruel, exquisite fingers! Io! I have brought you the brown clusters, The ivy-boughs and pine-cones. Your breasts are cold-sea-ripples, But they smell of the warm grasses. Throw wide the chiton and the peplum, Maidens of the Dew. Beautiful are your bodies, O Maenads, Beautiful the sudden folds, The vanishing curves of the white linen About you.