Reviewing Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans (reissued in 1934 in an abridged edition that reduced the novel's original 900-plus pages by almost half), Conrad Aiken complains about the still relentless effect of the novel's repetitious style, calling it “a complete esthetic miscalculation: it is dull; and although what it seeks to communicate is interesting, the cumbersomeness of the method defeats its own end…[I]t sounds as if someone attempted to paraphrase Jung's ‘Psychological Types’ in Basic English.” Aiken's passing reference to the lingua franca known as Basic English would be lost on many readers now, but in 1934, I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden's 850-word version of English, touted as an easy-to-learn alternative to Esperanto that would solve the communication difficulties of a “babelized” political economy, was an object of popular, and indeed, of distinctly poetic fascination. Aiken's point in invoking it here is to reiterate the frequent charge of excessive simplicity in Stein's writing by attributing that simplicity to an impoverished vocabulary (by implicit contrast to, say, the nearly 30,000-word vocabulary attributed to Shakespeare). The idea, then, is that Stein's choosing to repeat sentences with only slight variation over dozens of pages entails using a disproportionately small selection of words in forming those sentences. Obviously for Aiken, Basic English is just an incidental vehicle for denouncing one of Stein's early literary experiments. To poets like Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, however, Basic looked like a violation of the very medium of their art.