Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington (8 July 1892 – 27 July 1962), born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet. Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry.

Aldington by Howard Coster, 1931

Quotes

• Why do we call ourselves 'Imagists'. Well why not? Well I think it is a very good and descriptive title and it serves to enunciate some of the principles we mos firmly believe in... Direct treatment of the subject... as few adjectives as possible... a hardness, as of cut stone... individuality of rhythm...
  • Modern Poetry and the Imagists in the Egoist, London 1914

• I dream of silent verses where the rhyme
  Glides noiseless as an oar.
  • From At the British Museum Collected Poems, 1929

• By the sense of mystery I understand the experience of certain places and times when one's whole nature seems to be in touch with a prescence, a genius loci, a potency.
  • Introduction to Complete Poems, 1948

• I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant..Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre.
  • Introduction to Collected Poems, 1929

• Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill.
  • The Colonel’s Daughter (1931) pt. 1, ch. 6

Quotes about Richard Aldington

• Death of a Hero is a very angry novel; virulent is perhaps a better adjective... There is nothing Aldington does not view in hellish images. One has the impression of reading the testimony of a madman.
  • Kay Dick, 'A perverse and all-embracing hatred', The Times (8 September 1984), p. 15

• I have little to say in favour of Pinorman, and nothing in defence of the book about Lawrence. But Aldington wrote a book about the other Lawrence which is first-class. Death of a Hero was not the first of the books proclaiming the disillusion of the generation which fought the First World War but it was in the vanguard. And a man who has written such other novels as All Men are Enemies and Women Must Work; whose poems include A Fool i' the Forest and A Dream in the Luxembourg; who has one of the best single volumes on Voltaire to his credit; and whose other work ranges from French Studies and Reviews to translations of Alcestis and Fifty Romance Lyric Poems cannot be dismissed so easily.
  • William Haley (writing under the pseudonym Oliver Edwards), 'Richard Yea And Nay', The Times (3 January 1957), p. 11

• It is true that the war occupies only the third part of the novel [Death of a Hero]. But it was perhaps the first of the "angry young men's" novels; it is fine one: and it is interesting to compare Aldington's picture of the pre-war generation with Sassoon's.
  • William Haley (writing under the pseudonym Oliver Edwards), 'The Writers' War', The Times (19 November 1964), p. 16

• Richard Aldington is exactly the same inside, murder, suicide, rape—with a desire to be raped very strong—same thing really—just like you—only he doesn't face it, and gilds his perverseness.
  • D. H. Lawrence to Aldous Huxley (?28 October 1928), quoted in The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume Two, ed. Harry T. Moore (1962), p. 1096

• I well remember that first meeting. We had lunch together and then strolled up Charing Cross Road, looking at the bookshops and talking about our literary enthusiasms. Aldington looked very handsome in his uniform and I was immediately captivated by the brightness and candour of his features—a boyishness, one might call it, which he retained perhaps all his life, certainly until he left Europe. He was one of the most stimulating friends I have ever had—easy in conversation and very frank, full of strange oaths (mostly in French), his mind darting about rapidly from one aspect of a subject to another.
  • Herbert Read, contribution to Alister Kershaw and Fédéric-Jacques Temple (eds.), Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait (1966), p. 123

• Over thirty years, large numbers of copies of Richard Aldington's works have been printed. In 1935, Death of a Hero and in 1937 All Men are Enemies ran to 10,000 copies. In the second half of the fifties and at the beginning of the sixties, the situation changed dramatically. The number of copies printed of the 1961 edition of Death of a Hero was ten times as large (100,000 copies). All Men are Enemies ran to 225,000 copies (Goslitizdat) and was also published in Smerdlovsk, by a local publishing house which printed around 100,000 copies. These books did not lie round in the bookshops—they were sold literally in a few days, and now it is impossible to find them in the shops—not one reader has offered to sell to a second-hand bookseller, evidently because people do not want to part with them. When Richard Aldington's friend, Mr. Alister Kershaw, asked me to send him old Russian editions of the writer and I tried to get them from the second-hand booksellers, I was told, "There are neither old ones nor new ones to be had."
  • Mikhail Urnov, contribution to Alister Kershaw and Fédéric-Jacques Temple (eds.), Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait (1966), p. 157

• Richard Aldington has always been accepted in Russia, and still is, as a many-sided figure, a rounded personality. Articles have been written about him as a poet and a novelist, a translator and a critic, a man and a writer; the content of his works has been discussed and also their form, his works as a whole and individual books, and articles, studies, reviews and notices about him have appeared in works published in Moscow and Leningrad, in journals and in newspapers published in other cities. Papers have been read about him, lectures given, and students have written essays on him. His books have reached every part of our large country. And—what is even more important—his books are read. Our older and younger generations know Richard Aldington. He lives in our memory.
  • Mikhail Urnov, contribution to Alister Kershaw and Fédéric-Jacques Temple (eds.), Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait (1966), p. 161