Richard Aldington’s Modernist Antiquity

Abstract This book examines the importance of classics and classical reception in the poetry, novels, translations, essays, and letters of Richard Aldington (1892–1962). The book has a double focus: first, to demonstrate the crucial role of classical receptions in Aldington’s writings from 1910 to 1933, and second, to re-evaluate Aldington’s importance in the history of modernism in English literature, and so also to highlight the centrality of his classical receptions for the modernist project. Aldington was a key figure in the English literary world of the 1910s and 1920s. With Ezra Pound and H.D., he founded the Imagist movement in 1912; his translational theory was a forerunner of modernist translational practices; he was recognized as a significant war poet; and his modernist war novel Death of a Hero (1929) was widely acclaimed. In all these areas, Aldington was a central player in the development of modernism. Nevertheless, his importance has been generally underrecognized in literary histories of the 1910s and 1920s. This book counters that neglect by surveying Aldington’s involvement in the pre- and post-war literary culture of London and by demonstrating the significance of his work as poet, critic, and novelist for Modernist theory and practice. Throughout, the book establishes the crucial importance of classical literature in Aldington’s poetry, essays, and novels, and thus also demonstrates classics’ significance in the development of modernism. The book includes detailed readings of many of Aldington’s poems and contextualizes them through excerpts from his essays, reviews, and letters. In addition, the book draws extensively on archival resources, including unpublished letters, translations, and essays, and prints several previously unpublished poems.