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More  Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets

Richard Aldington

by Robert W. Haynes

Other literary forms

TABLE OF established himself in the literary world of London as a CONTENTS youthful poet, but later in life he increasingly devoted his attention to prose Other literary forms fiction, translation, biography, and criticism. His first novel, Death of a Hero Achievements (1929), drew favorable attention, and it was followed in 1930 by Roads to Biography Glory, a collection of thirteen short stories. Aldington continued to publish Analysis fiction until 1946, when his last novel, The Romance of Casanova, appeared.

The long poems Richard Aldington Bibliography (Library of Congress) From early in his career, Aldington was highly regarded as a translator. He translated : Selections from All His Works (1929; 2 volumes) from French, The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (1930) from Italian, Alcestis (1930) from classical Greek, and other works from Latin and Provençal.

Aldington wrote biographies of the duke of Wellington (1943) and of (1957), along with Voltaire (1925), D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius But . . . (1950), and Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955), along with a substantial body of critical essays.

Other miscellaneous works include Life for Life’s Sake: A Book of Reminiscences (1941) and Pinorman: Personal Recollections of , Pino Orioli, and Charles Prentice (1954). Aldington also edited The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World (1941).

Achievements Despite Richard Aldington’s extensive publications in criticism and in a variety of literary genres, he remains inextricably associated with the movement known as Imagism, of which he was certainly a founding member, along with the American poets H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and .

Although only twenty years old when Imagism was conceived in 1912, Aldington found himself part of a minirevolution against wordiness and imprecision in poetry, a revolution formulated in terms of advocacy of effective images and cogent free verse.

Aldington’s later poems, though eliciting occasional praise from distinguished critics, actually did little to enhance the reputation he had earned as an Imagist. In 1947, Aldington was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography of Wellington, and shortly before his death he was invited to Moscow, where his achievements were celebrated by the Soviet Writers’ Union.

Biography

Richard Aldington was born Edward Godfree Aldington in Portsmouth, England, but spent most of his youth in Dover before enrolling at University College in London in 1910. A year later, his family having suffered from a financial reverse, Aldington left the college and went to work for a newspaper. He had already developed a keen interest in poetry and soon met others who shared his enthusiasm, including the Americans H. D. and Ezra Pound. Pound urged that the three promulgate their poetic affinities for precision, economy of language, striking images, and free verse, and Aldington and H. D. agreed, thus creating the literary movement known as Imagism.

Pound encouraged , editor of Poetry, a new literary magazine, to publish Imagist verse, and in 1912, three poems by Aldington appeared, earning their author forty dollars and publicly establishing the twenty-year-old poet as a representative of the new movement. In London, Aldington met William Butler Yeats and other luminaries. He visited Paris and Italy and, in 1914, having married H. D. in the previous year, became assistant editor of a journal named , which developed into a significant outlet for Imagist productions. In the same year, ten of Aldington’s poems were published in , an anthology edited by Pound that also included poems by H. D., , , , and William Carlos Williams, among others.

Aldington’s first collection of his own work was Images, 1910-1915, which came out in 1915, by which time he had also embarked on his long career of literary translation, publishing The Poems of Anyte of Tegea and Latin Poems of the Renaissance that year. In 1916, he volunteered for military service and saw action on the front until the end of the war. He was eventually discharged from service with the rank of captain. His experiences of the horrors of combat sent him back to England a changed man, and his marriage to H. D.—which had already suffered from their prolonged separation—proved unable to survive the challenge of their collective trauma. Though not officially divorced until 1938, Aldington and H. D. actually ended their marriage shortly after .

Returning to London’s literary life, Aldington resumed his career as poet and critic, accepting a position writing for the Times Literary Supplement and continuing to publish poems, translations, and criticism. He eventually decided, however, to move to the country, where he hoped to be able to work without distraction. This move was successful, and Aldington read, wrote, and translated diligently in his rural environment for several years, visiting Italy in 1922 and in 1926. In 1924, he published his first long poem, A Fool i’ the Forest, which may be retrospectively regarded as a final departure from the Imagist lyrics of his youth. By 1927, Aldington was spending time in Paris, where he met and Hart Crane, and in 1928, he decided to leave England for good.

In 1929, Aldington published the novel Death of a Hero, which was based on his own experiences during World War I. This year also saw the appearance of another long poem, The Eaten Heart. Aldington remained in Italy and France during most of the next several years, with trips to Africa, Spain, and Portugal, and, as always, he worked steadily wherever he was. By the time European totalitarianism drove him from the Continent in 1935, Aldington had three more novels, another long poem, and a book of short stories in print, along with more translations.

With Benito Mussolini dominating Italy, Francisco Franco holding sway in Spain, and Adolf Hitler ruling Germany, Aldington, whose attitude toward Britain had not changed since 1928, looked westward. He crossed the Atlantic in 1935 and lived for several months in Tobago before moving to the United States, where he eventually took up residence in Connecticut. He had published Life Quest, a long poem, in 1935, and in 1937 he published a novel titled Very Heaven and his last long poem, The Crystal World.

Despite his initial enthusiasm for the United States, Aldington gradually became disenchanted with American life. In 1943 he published The Duke, Being an Account of the Life and Achievements of Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, the Wellington biography that would later win Aldington the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1944, he spent some time as a Hollywood film writer, but, shortly after the war, he returned to France. In 1946, The Romance of Casanova, a novel, marked the end of Aldington’s publication of fiction. From this point onward, though he remained industrious, his output was restricted to criticism and biography.

Aldington had been a personal friend of D. H. Lawrence and had always admired Lawrence’s work, and in 1950 he issued D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius But . . . , a work that was followed by two publications that would damage Aldington’s reputation and income for the rest of his life. Pinorman, a memoir focused on Aldington’s old acquaintance Norman Douglas, aroused resentment among Douglas’s friends and adherents, who regarded it as a betrayal on Aldington’s part. Still more controversial was Lawrence of Arabia (1955), which attacked the putative heroism, modesty, and truthfulness of a revered hero of World War I. Lawrence’s admirers exerted some remarkable efforts to prevent the publication of this book, and when it at length appeared, many of them engaged in vehement personal attacks on Aldington. These attacks caused a serious reduction in Aldington’s royalties, as booksellers and publishers refused to handle his works, and he remained on the defensive and in financial difficulties for the rest of his life.

Aldington went on to publish Introduction to Mistral (1956), Frauds (1957), and Portrait of a Rebel: The Life and Work of Robert Louis Stevenson (1957). In 1962, he went to the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Soviet Writers’ Union and was honored there for his contributions to literature. He died on July 27, 1962, near Sury-en-Vaux, France.

Analysis

Richard Aldington’s reputation as poet has been unduly shaped by the circumstances under which he published his early works. As one of the three original Imagists (along with Ezra Pound and H. D.), he at twenty was several years younger than his literary partners. Pound, already rather famous and something of a swashbuckler, aggressively cultivated the reputation of a trendsetter, and H. D.’s lyric gifts must have been enhanced in Aldington’s eyes by her beauty. Pound and H. D. had already been friends for years, so the young Aldington must have felt privileged to have been admitted to their circle and to have his work appreciated by them. Imagism

It is clear that the famous principles of Imagism—directness, economy, and musical phrasing—are as frequently absent from Imagist poetry as they are present, and one must suspect the dogmatic hand of Pound in their formulation. Aldington’s very early “Choricos” already suggests divergence from the movement’s program: Brushing the fields with red-shod feet, With purple robe Searing the grass as with a sudden flame, Death, Thou hast come upon us.

Here there are colors (“red,” “purple”), powerful verbs (“Brushing,” “Searing”), alliteration, and assonance, but there is conspicuously no concrete image, and the absence of such an image works effectively to represent the mystery of death, whose certainty is more evident in inevitability than in visibility. However, some conscious efforts were made by Aldington to focus on clear, arresting images. In “Round-Pond,” he wrote: Water ruffled and speckled by galloping wind Which puffs and spurts it into tiny pashing breakers Dashed with lemon-yellow afternoon sunlight. The shining of the sun upon the water Is like a scattering of gold crocus petals In a long wavering irregular flight.

As pleasant and as exuberant as these lines are, they prepare no modernist jolt, for some lines later the poem concludes, “Even the cold wind is seeking a new mistress.” This conclusion deflates the gentle pretensions of the preceding lines and seemingly defies the rigid seriousness of the announced program of Imagism.

Although Aldington’s youthful work betrays influences that do not appear to have been fully integrated in his vision, his erudition and his sensitive ear for the music of language often helped him create his own voice. The Imagists’ passion for classical poetry, tempered as it was by their experiments with English versions of Japanese poetry, combined in Aldington’s case with his reading of Walt Whitman and Algernon Charles Swinburne to produce insights that were first to be subjected to the psychological stress of front-line combat and later to the implications of Aldington’s long recuperation from his wartime experiences. In 1915, Aldington was able to express emotional simplicity with his understated lines from “Epigrams”: “She has new leaves/ After her dead flowers,/ Like the little almond tree/ Which the frost hurt.” In the same collection, however, his rage about the pain of his childhood is elaborated at Whitmanesque length in a performance in which outrage consistently outdistances art: The bitterness, the misery, the wretchedness of childhood Put me out of love with God, I can’t believe in God’s goodness; I can believe In many avenging gods.

Though the doors to poetic recognition had been opened by his own talent as well as by the encouragement of his friends, Aldington was still developing a personal technique when the war came. World War I was a devastating experience for him, however. He wrote poems during and after the war in which some of his Imagist techniques are manifest, but it is in his collection Exile, and Other Poems that the effects of the trauma of war are revealed. Recalling his grim life in combat in the poem "Eumenides," Aldington mused about That boot I kicked (It had a mouldy foot in it) The night K’s head was smashed Like a rotten pear by a mortar.

The title of the poem, of course, refers to the monstrous Furies of Greek mythology, and Aldington was not to conquer his personal Furies until, at the end of the decade, he put his war experiences into prose with Death of a Hero and Roads to Glory, a sequence of short stories. Exile, and Other Poems, in fact, marks the end of Aldington’s effort to express himself artistically in short poems. The long poems

Aldington’s first long poem, A Fool i’ the Forest, was published in 1924. Subtitled A Phantasmagoria, the work combines a variety of poetic forms with narrative free verse to represent the psychomachia of the modern individual in crisis, evoking echoes of the past (William Shakespeare) and responding to contemporary poetry, notably that of T. S. Eliot. The shifting setting of the poem takes its protagonist from Greece to the trenches of France and finally back to London, where, his hopes defeated, he subsides into a conventional existence.

A Dream in the Luxembourg was written in 1928 but not immediately published. It was inspired by a love affair commenced at the time by Aldington, though it is notably devoid of the techniques generally considered poetic. Aldington published another of his long poems, The Eaten Heart, in 1929, and this poem also shows its author’s rejection of conventional poetics. It focuses, as had A Fool i’ the Forest, upon the fragmentation of modern existence, the dehumanization resulting from the rise of technology, and human isolation.

Life Quest, like Joyce’s (1922), evokes Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725

B.C.E.; English translation, 1614), but the journey here also partakes of the religious qualities of the medieval quest. Aldington’s hero makes his way at the end of the poem to Gibraltar, perhaps suggesting the poet’s own decision to go to the United States.

Aldington’s last long poem and last published poem, The Crystal World, appeared in 1937. Divided into two main sections, each with subsections, this poem marks both a return to lyricism and Aldington’s own farewell to the composition of poetry. The poem explores the mystery and the promise of love, its frustrations and consummations. Aldington, now a middle-aged man and a veteran of more than war, ended his poetic career writing of love.

Bibliography

1 Crawford, Fred D. Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. A detailed description of the controversy arising from Aldington’s biography of T. E. Lawrence. The frequent quotations from Aldington provide an excellent portrait of his character in middle age, and other material gives insights into his life as poet.

2 Doyle, Charles. Richard Aldington: A Biography. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. This most comprehensive and up-to-date biography of Aldington does ample justice to his many-faceted gifts as a writer.

3 ______, ed. Richard Aldington: Reappraisals. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria Press, 1990. A collection of essays that reconsider Aldington’s reputation as poet, novelist, and writer of nonfiction. The assumption behind this collection is that Aldington was unjustly blacklisted as a result of his frank treatment of T. E. Lawrence.

4 Gates, Norman T. The Poetry of Richard Aldington: A Critical Evaluation and an Anthology of Uncollected Poems. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974. A thorough study that reviews the criticism of Aldington’s poetry from 1910 to the early 1970’s and assesses his position as a poet and speaker of his time. This scholarly and appreciative work has located 129 uncollected poems in newspapers, periodicals, and unpublished manuscripts, as well as early books of his poetry omitted from The Complete Poems. Includes a valuable bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

5 ______, ed. Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. An effort to display Aldington’s temperament and experiences by means of selections from his correspondence.

6 Kempton, Daniel, and H. R. Stoneback, eds. Writers in Provence: Proceedings of the First and Second International Richard Aldington Conferences. New Paltz, N.Y.: Gregau Press and the International Richard Aldington Society, 2003. These essays on Aldington presented at an international conference shed light on his works and life.

7 Kershaw, Alister, and Frédéric-Jacques Temple, eds. Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. An anthology of favorable comments on Aldington from various distinguished persons, including T. S. Eliot, , Sir Herbert Read, and C. P. Snow. Also contains an excellent bibliography of Aldington’s writings.

8 McGreevy, Thomas. Richard Aldington: An Englishman. 1931. Reprint. New York: Haskell House, 1974. An earlier, full-length study of Aldington, with critical commentary of his works only up to 1931. An appreciative study, it covers Aldington’s novels and poems, with emphasis on Death of a Hero.

9 Smith, Richard Eugene. Richard Aldington. Boston: Twayne, 1977. A comprehensive survey of Aldington’s work, noting that his leadership in the Imagist movement during the 1920’s was but a small part of his varied and productive literary career. Includes criticism of Aldington’s major novels as well as his work as a biographer, translator, and critic. A selected bibliography is provided.

10 Zilboorg, Caroline, ed. Richard Aldington and H. D.: Their Lives in Letters, 1918-1961. New York: Palgrave, 2003. A collection of letters between two Imagist poets who were husband and wife, with a commentary and introduction that sheds light on their poetry.

Citation Types

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MLA Style Haynes, Robert W. "Richard Aldington." Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Salem, 2011. Salem Online, https://online.salempress.com

APA Style Haynes, H. (2011). Richard Aldington. In R. Reisman (Ed.), Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets. Hackensack: Salem. Retrieved from https://online.salempress.com

CHICAGO Style Haynes, Robert W. "Richard Aldington." Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets. Hackensack: Salem, 2011. Accessed April 16, 2019. https://online.salempress.com.