Richard Aldington (1892 - 1962)
Richard Aldington (christened Edward Godfree Aldington) grew
up in Kent, the son of a solicitor. He
attended Dover College in Kent. The family moved
to London in 1909 and Aldington began an undergraduate course at University
College London in 1910, but had to abandon it a year later because of his
father’s financial problems. Determined to
make his living as a writer, Aldington worked as a part-time sports journalist
and wrote poetry, publishing it where he could, but in 1912 he met the American poets Ezra Pound and H.D., and a another
English poet, Frank Flint, with whom he founded Imagism. He contributed to a series of Imagist
anthologies, first edited by Pound and subsequently by the American poet Amy
Lowell, as well as publishing his own volume, Images 1910-1915. Aldington
and H.D. married in 1913.
Aldington was assistant editor on the journal, The Egoist for three years, but was conscripted in June 1916 and served with the 11th Leicestershires (a pioneer regiment) on the Western Front until mid 1917. He returned to England to train as an officer and was commissioned in the 9th Royal Sussex Regiment, returning to the Front in April 1918. He finished the war as a signals officer and temporary captain, being demobilised in February 1919.
Aldington composed two volumes of poetry during his active service, Images of War and Images of Desire, but perhaps the most powerful of the poems to come out of his war experience were those that dealt with the difficult years of recovery, Exile and Other Poems, published in 1923. At the end of the war, his marriage collapsed and he struggled to re-establish his literary career. In 1929 he published his best-selling novel, Death of a Hero, a grimly realistic portrayal of his war experience and a savage attack on those he saw as having been responsible for the war. Its success allowed him to leave England and he never again made it his home, living mainly in France, and, during the Second World War, in the United States. A collection of short stories about the war, Roads to Glory, appeared in 1930.
Aldington wrote a further seven novels and continued to write poetry until 1937, but became better known as a critic, translator and biographer. His biographies of D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas and, particularly of T.E. Lawrence (in 1954), made him a controversial figure. His memoirs, entitled Life for Life’s Sake, appeared in 1941. He died in France in 1962, after a triumphant visit to the Soviet Union, where his novels were highly regarded. He left one daughter, Catherine, the child of his second marriage; she died in 2010.
Aldington’s two years’ experience as a combatant had an enormous influence on his subsequent writing. His war poetry carries the signs of his Imagist background. Mostly in free verse, highly sensuous and realistic but often discursive in manner, it is a candid portrayal of war as experienced by a sensitive man with a passion for beauty.
In the Library 1919
There is a strange void in my brain.
I bend over the black-speckled page
and try to seize its life. What is it
I am reading? Greek? What does
Greek matter?
The rose-crowns of Anacreon, the
dances of women eager to be taken,
the sound of the fluid syllables,
escape me.
I am out again on the muddy
trench-boards, wearily trudging along
those chalky ditches, under the rain,
under the shells. . . .
I am utterly weary now that it is over,
weary as the lost Argonauts beating
hopelessly for home against the
implacable storm.
Suggested
Reading
An imagist at war: the complete war poems of Richard Aldington edited by Michael Copp (Associated University Presses, 2002)
Richard Aldington and HD: their lives in letters 1918 – 1961 edited by Caroline Zilboorg (Manchester University Press, 2003)
Links
www.imagists.org (The web-site of the International Richard Aldington and H.D. Societies)