Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington (born July 8, 1892, Hampshire, Eng.—died July 27, 1962, Sury-en-Vaus, France) was a 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.

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