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The poet and novelist Richard Aldington is largely forgotten today, except for his association with the Imagist movement, an important element of modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. He was brought up in East Kent, the eldest child of Albert and May Aldington. The family moved house frequently, from Dover, to Walmer, to St Margaret’s Bay and to Sandwich, before moving to London in 1909 (Harrow and Teddington). Aldington went to Mr Sweetman’s Seminary for Young Gentlemen in St Margaret’s Bay, and then to Dover College, an institution he disliked, and as a consequence made little effort at his studies, though he was fortunate in having access to his father’s library of around two thousand books.

From what Michelle Crowther tells us about his mother, family life cannot have been easy, and ‘the bitterness/ the misery, the wretchedness of childhood’ are recorded in an early poem, ‘Childhood’, published when he was 21.¹

Despite his unhappy childhood, Aldington clearly loved the East Kent landscape and its flora and insect life, particularly the butterflies and moths, and he would explore these things on the cliffs with a ‘field note-book’ and pencil to hand. Birdsong, too, made an impression on the boy, and he would lean out of his bedroom window listening to the thrushes sing. Episodes in his novel The Death of a Hero (1929) based on his own experiences on the Western Front in the First World War mirror some of those in his autobiography, Life for Life’s Sake (1941), and in the opening pages of both books he writes lyrically and in detail about those experiences, and with gratitude about the older men who encouraged his interest in the natural world, poetry and the classical world. By piecing together extracts from both books, we can get a sense of the impact this countryside had on him.

The narrator of Death of a Hero tells us that the country inland from Martin’s Point (St Margaret’s) has a silvery-grey quality, with long, gentle slopes. Here sheep and wind keep down the turf on which grow orchids, bugloss, knapweed and harebells. In the valleys are foxgloves and thistles, with clover and ox-eye daisies, which would be populated by an array of butterflies in summer – Marbled Whites, Chalkhill Blue, Meadow Browns, Peacocks, Painted Ladies, and in one corner, Clouded Yellows. This land is at the mercy of the south-west gales which bend the thorn bushes and the occasional tree away from the sea. In Life for Life’s Sake Aldington talks of those storms and how he would take his field glasses or telescope to see ships as they were wrecked on the Goodwin Sands. On such stormy nights he would peer from his window, watching the surf crashing on the rocks below, and would later lie in bed as the wind and the rain battered against the window panes, and the light from South Foreland lighthouse flashed through the curtain.

Of the towns and villages, George Winterbourne, the eponymous Hero, likes ‘Hamborough’ best, with its Barbican which leads onto the Marshes. From Hamborough you can walk past ‘almshouses and the hoary stone-mullioned Elizabethan Grammar School [now Manwood Court] over the level crossing, to Saxon “Friedasburg”, where tradition said a temple to Freya had once stood’. Aldington, for his part, talks of once wealthy Sandwich with its Barbican and Fisher Gate, old churches and houses, ‘Wodensborough’ [sic] with its shrine to Woden, as well as Richborough with its ‘indestructible walls’ Both George and Aldington detested Dullborough, ‘the town which contained his father’s offices and the minor public school which he attended’: Dover, and Dover College. In both books a long walk takes place: to Crockton in fiction, to Barfreston in reality. Aldington notes the Norman church. ‘We looked at the remarkable Norman carvings on the church, and sat in the sunshine on a low tomb facing the sculptured porch. A butterfly settled on a lichened gravestone, and we remembered that for the Greeks it was a symbol of the soul.’

He and his companion take lunch at a pub he thought was called ‘The Oak’. This must have been ‘The Yew Tree’ which was still a pub in the twenty-first century, only closing in 2010. And Aldington rejoices in the fact that that as a child he had glimpses of an England which had changed little since Shakespeare or Chaucer, whose lanes were white instead of black with tarmac, and before smithies ‘ringing with the clink of hammers on anvils and full of the acrid smell of burning hoofs’ were replaced by garages with petrol pumps.

George Winterbourne aspires to be an artist. Like George, Aldington had initially aspired to be an artist, but it was a sneaky glance at an open copy of Oscar Wilde’s Intentions on his father’s desk which changed things. The paragraph he began reading was about Keats and this led him to take down from his father’s bookshelf a book of Keats’ poetry, and to read ‘Endymion’.² Immediately the fifteen-year-old began reading poetry voraciously, fortunate that his father’s library had a fine selection. A few months later he was insect-hunting on the cliffs and, lying down after chasing a fritillary, a view of the Channel lit by the evening sun before him, found a line of iambic pentameter came to him spontaneously, followed by another which rhymed with the first. He used his field note-book to write these lines down. More lines ensued, and he realised that the experience of writing a poem far surpassed that of reading one. His career as a poet had begun.

In 1910 he went to University College in London, where he studied classics, but left after one year because of his father’s financial situation. It was a time when British cultural life was moving out of the aesthetic of the Victorian Age into new visions of new forms of poetry, feminism, and philosophy. With the connections he had already made, he became a part of that cultural hotbed of writers and artists active in the years before the First World

War, and a prominent member of the Imagists, whose thinking was to be a catalyst for poetry, something which would enable poets, both combatants and civilians, express their experiences of that War. He worked closely with Ezra Pound, with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, whom he was to marry), and Ford Madox Hueffer (as Ford Madox Ford was then known), and his social circle included such writers as T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Herbert Read and W.B. Yeats.

The Imagist movement is first mentioned, under its French name Imagisme, in two articles in the March 1913 issue of Poetry, and in his Introduction to An Imagist at War, Aldington’s complete war poems, Michael Copp tells us that the unsigned preface to Amy Lowell’s 1915 anthology of Imagist poetry is substantially Aldington’s. The life of Imagism was short, and the movement folded in 1917.

Aldington did not enlist until 1916 for medical reasons, and did not enjoy being a soldier. His war poems reflect this. The greater part of poetry stemming from First World War experiences was written by men serving, or who had served, in the Army in the French/Belgian theatre of war. They were trapped in the muddy, infested trenches (which Paul Fussell aptly calls ‘The Troglodyte World’) in the destroyed landscape of Flanders and Picardy, a landscape resonant, and increasingly a mockery, of the chalk downlands of Southern England. The increasingly horrific circumstances cried out for something to react against them. Aldington’s poems reflect that horror, a horror which is often being visited on the classical world in the form of Greek gods and goddesses whose constellations look down from the skies, or the natural world with its trees and flowers and birds, often in freezing weather, just as much as it is visited on the human beings.

After the First World War many writers attempted to come to terms with their experiences, by writing out the pain and horror in plays and literature as well as poems. Copp describes how it was by writing The Death of a Hero which enabled Aldington to ‘purge his system of dangerous material that he felt had been poisoning him for a decade.’³ The dust jacket for the first edition was created by Paul Nash, who himself had suffered on the battlefield, as Phil Hubbard tells us, tripping and injuring himself in the trenches.

Bibliography

Aldington, Richard. The Death of a Hero. 1929. Penguin, 2013.
–. Life for Life’s Sake. 1941. Cassell, 1968.
Copp, Michael. An Imagist at War. Associated U P, 2002.
Doyle, Charles. Richard Aldington: A Biography. Macmillan, 1989.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford U P, 2000.
Ed. Monroe, Harriet. Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, Chicago, March 1913 et seq.

References