It is the great irony of Richard Aldington's career that he is today chiefly remembered for his youthful involvement in a "modernist" literary movement he quickly disowned, and that much of his mature verse records his doubts about the possibility of writing poetry in the modern world. Aldington was only twenty when Ezra Pound launched him as a leading spirit of the "Imagistes," who intended to sweep away late Victorian cobwebs by devoting themselves to clear images--"hardness, as of cut stone," was Aldington's own formula--and to the flexible rhythms of vers libre. At one time or another the imagists included in their ranks, in addition to Aldington and Pound himself, such poets as H. D., F. S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams. Throughout the second decade of the twentieth century, "imagism" was a rallying cry, a shibboleth...