Richard
Aldington
original name Edward Godfree Aldington
born July 8, 1892, Hampshire, Eng.
died July 27, 1962, Sury-en-Vaus, France
poet, novelist, critic, and biographer
who wrote searingly and sometimes irascibly
of what he considered to be hypocrisy in
modern industrialized civilization.
Educated at Dover College and London
University, Aldington early attracted
attention through his volumes of Imagist
verse (see Imagists). In 1913 he married
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.; divorced 1938), the
American Imagist poet. Aldington’s
contribution is difficult to assess. His
best and best known novel, Death of a Hero
(1929), to which All Men Are Enemies (1933)
was a sequel, reflected the disillusionment
of a generation that had fought through
World War I. In The Colonel’s Daughter
(1931) he satirized sham gentility and
literary preciousness so outspokenly that
two lending libraries refused to handle the
novel. However, in his long poems A Dream in
the Luxembourg (1930) and A Fool i’ the
Forest (1925) he inveighed against the
mechanization of modern man more lyrically,
with bittersweet romanticism. His
translations from ancient Greek and Latin
poets revealed his love for earlier
civilizations. His book of reminiscences,
Life for Life’s Sake, was published in 1941.
Aldington’s critical works, uneven in
quality, included Literary Studies (1924),
French Studies and Reviews (1926), and
biographies of Voltaire, D.H. Lawrence,
Norman Douglas, and Wellington. Lawrence of
Arabia (1955), one of his last books, was an
uncompromising attack on T.E. Lawrence. Late
in life Aldington became a best-seller in
the U.S.S.R., where he celebrated his 70th
birthday. A Passionate Pilgrim: Letters to
Alan Bird from Richard Aldington, 1949–1962
was published in 1975.
