BA. Conrad Aiken

4. ‘The Return of Romanticism’. Review of Japanese Prints (BH7), by John Gould Fletcher. Dial 65 (September 1918): 165-67.

	‘One admits that beauty and wonder are not to be found at one’s humble and matter-of-fact door, and so takes refuge in the impalpability and marvel of distance.’ Reprinted in Scepticisms.

Though Aiken recalls in the letter to Miner (18) that he and Fletcher, his friend at Harvard, had both ‘dived into’ Japanese and Chinese poetry in the years 1915-17, by this review of late 1918 he is sharply critical of Fletcher’s Japanese interests. ‘In Japanese Prints, even more . . . than in Irradiations [BH2]—and certainly more conventionally than in Goblins and Pagodas [BH4]—we find [Fletcher] participating in the current romantic nostalgia for the remote and strange’; as Aldington, H. D., Lowell, and Pound have ‘exploited’ Greece and China, ‘so now Mr. Fletcher takes his turn with Japan’. This ‘tendency’ is ‘indicative of a curious truckling to reason. . . . One admits that [beauty and wonder] are not to be found at one’s humble and matter-of-fact door, and [so] takes refuge in the impalpability and marvel of distance.’ This tendency to romanticise is but one of Aiken’s objections to Imagism, especially as practised by Amy Lowell. This article and others expressing related doubts and general misgivings are collected in Scepticisms (6).