Richard Aldington

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Richard Aldington (8 July 1892 – 27 July 1962), born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet, and an early associate of the Imagist movement.

He was married to the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.

D.) from 1911 to 1938.

Aldington's 50 year career included work in poetry, novels, criticism and biography.

He edited The Egoist literary journal and wrote for magazines such as The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Criterion and Poetry.

His biography of Wellington (1946) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

His circle included writers and critics such as T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Lawrence Durrell and C. P. Snow.

He championed H.D.

as the major poetic voice of the Imagist movement and helped to bring her work to international notice.

Early life and marriage

Aldington was born in Portsmouth, the eldest of four children and the son of a solicitor. Both his parents wrote and published books, and their home held a large library of European and classical literature. As well as reading, Aldington's interests at this time, all of which continued in later life, included butterfly-collecting, hiking, and learning languages – he went on to master French, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek. He was educated at Mr. Sweetman's Seminary for Young Gentlemen, St Margaret's Bay, near Dover. His father died of heart problems at age 56.

Aldington attended Dover College, followed by the University of London. He was unable to complete his degree because of the financial circumstances of his family caused by his father's failed speculations and ensuing debt. Supported by a small allowance from his parents, he worked as a sports journalist, started publishing poetry in British journals, and gravitated towards literary circles that included poets William Butler Yeats and Walter de la Mare.

In 1911 Aldington met society hostess Brigit Patmore, with whom he had a passing affair. At the time he was described as "tall and broad-shouldered, with a fine forehead, thick longish hair of the indefinite colour blond hair turns to in adolescence, very bright blue eyes, too small a nose, and a determined mouth." Through her he met American poets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, who had previously been engaged to each other. Doolittle and Aldington grew closer and in 1913 travelled together extensively through Italy and France, just before the war. On their return to London in the summer they moved into separate flats in Churchwalk, Kensington, in West London. Doolittle lived at No. 6, Aldington at No. 8, and Pound at No. 10. In the presence of Pound and the Doolittle family, over from America for the summer, the couple married. They moved to 5 Holland Place Chambers into a flat of their own, although Pound soon moved in across the hall.

The poets were caught up in the literary ferment before the war, where new politics and ideas were passionately discussed and created in Soho tearooms and society salons. The couple bonded over their visions of new forms of poetry, feminism, and philosophy, emerging from the wake of staid Victorian mores. The couple were fed by a sense of peership and mutualism between them, rejecting hierarchies, beginning to view Pound as an intruder and interloper rather than a literary igniter.

The couple met influential American poet Amy Lowell and she introduced them to writer D. H. Lawrence in 1914, who would become a close friend and mentor to both.

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Early career

Aldington's poetry was associated with the Imagist group, which is a movement that promotes minimalist free verse with vivid photographs in the attempt to banish Victorian moralism. The group was instrumental in the emergence of the New Modernist movement. Ezra Pound coined the term imagistes for H. D. and Aldington (1912). Poetry by Aldington forms almost a third of the Imagists' inaugural anthology Des Imagistes (1914). The movement was heavily inspired by Japanese and classical European art. T. E. Hulme's conviction that experimentation with traditional Japanese verse styles may be a step forward for avant-garde literature in English.

Pound donated three of Aldington's poems to Harriet Monroe's magazine Poetry in November 1912. "Mr Richard Aldington, a young English poet who belongs to the "Imagistes," a group of ardent Hellenists who are performing interesting experiments in vers libre, is a young English poet. "Choricos" was his finest work, "one of the most beautiful death songs in the language," she said.

H.D. In August 1914, Aldington and H.D. became pregnant, and in 1915 Aldington and H.D. Families were relocated from Ezra Pound, Holland Park, to Hampstead, close to D. Lawrence and Frieda. They felt more at ease out of the city's chaos with more open space and green. The pregnancy resulted in a stillborn daughter, which traumatized the parents and put a strain on their relationship; H.D. Aldington was 28 years old and Aldington 22, 22. The outbreak of war in 1914 deeply shocked Aldington, but no draft was available at the time. H.D. I grew older from the melee, without having a close link to the European continent, cultural or political. This rift brought the marriage under intense strain. When Aldington first dreamed of escape to America and began to have affairs, he was terrified. He began a life with Florence Fallas, who had also lost a child.

Aldington, a literary editor and a columnist at The Egoist, worked between 1914 and 1916. He served as assistant editor at Leonard Compton-Rickett under Dora Marsden. Aldington knew Wyndham Lewis well and wrote about his time in The Egoist. He was also a Ford Madox Ford associate, assisting him with a government commission in 1914 and taking dictation for The Good Soldier.

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