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Richard Aldington. (1892-1962)
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Richard Aldington (who was christened Edward Godfree), was born on 8 July, 1892 in Portsmouth, Hampshire. (He describes the town in his poem, Childhood, as suffocatingly dull). He was the son of a solicitor, and for four years was educated at Dover College (the family having moved to Dover earlier) and for a year at the University of London. By the age of 19 he read Greek, Latin, French and Italian with ease. He had the added good fortune of having access to his father's library which contained many volumes of poetry; this prepared him at the age of 18 to launch a creative attack on poetic tradition. His own first volume of poems had appeared when he was 17.
In 1911 he met the American poet Hilda Doolittle, who was already calling herself H.D. She was six years his senior and in 1913 the two were married.
Aldington and H.D. were taken up by the American poet Ezra Pound, who sent their poetry to his friend Harriet Monroe for the Chicago Poetry magazine. Pound coined the term Imagists for them, and in 1914 published their poetry in his own anthology, Des Imagistes.
Aldintgon edited the periodical Egoist, contributing essays on French poetry and philosophy from 1914 to 1917. The magazine became the periodical of the Imagist school. He and H.D. translated from Greek and Latin and brought out a volume called Images, Old and New in 1915. Aldington, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis joined forces in their efforts to shake the complacence of the literary world through the magazine Blast.
In 1916 Aldington enlisted in the Infantry and whilst he was at the Western Front, T. S. Eliot edited Egoist. Aldington's experiences in the trenches led to a diagnosis of neurasthenia (commonly and innaccurately known as "shell-shock"). Through the Twenties, ill, bitter and feeling broken Aldington managed to scrape a living in France and Italy as a freelance writer and translator (see Fifty Romantic Lyric Poems, 1931). He had already published his book of war poetry, Images of War in 1919, when in 1929 he published his angry war novel, Death of a Hero, described by George Parfitt in Fiction of the First World War : A Study (Faber and Faber : 1988) as being "preoccupied with the idea of war transforming its victims" (page 43). This, Aldington's first novel, made him famous and it is probably his best known work (for some people it's his only known work).
Aldington wrote other novels such as The Colonel's Daughter (1931) and published several volumes of poetry such as The Fool I' the Forest, a phantasmagoric work that owes much to Eliot's The Waste Land, and which was much ridiculed on its publication in 1925.
Aldington left England for America at the beginning of the Second World War (his marriage to H.D. had been dissolved in 1927 although the two had been estranged for many years).
Aldington wrote several biographies. including a Life of Wellington which won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1946 (which Siegfried Sassoon had won in 1929 for his Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man). Aldington's study of D. H. Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius . . . but was published in 1950 and a study of T. E. Lawrence followed in 1953.
Aldington's autobiography, Life for Life's Sake was published in 1941. He died in 1962.
Aldington was a prolific writer see http://www.well.com/user/heddy/rabib1.htm for a bibliography. A biography Richard Aldington, a biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989) was written by Charles Doyle, and is available from Amazon US. For some examples of Aldington's poetry visit see 'Prelude', 'Images' or 'At The British Museum' in the Bartleby collection.)
© Michèle Fry, 1998.
http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/aldington.htm
Richard Aldington