One is liable to expect other people to see, on their first reading of a book, all that one has come to perceive in the course of a developing intimacy with it. I have read Nightwood a number of times, in manuscript, in proof, and after publication. What one can do for other readers—assuming that if you read this preface at all you will read it first—is to trace the more significant phases of one's own appreciation of it. For it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole.

In describing Nightwood for the purpose of attracting readers to the English edition, I said that it would "appeal primarily to readers of poetry."… I do not want to suggest that the distinction of the book is primarily verbal, and still less that the astonishing language covers...