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Richard Aldington.
Richard
Aldington
was born in Hampshire
in 1882. Educated at Dover College and London University he founded
the Egotist journal in 1913. He
joined the British Army and served on the
Western Front in 1916-18 where he was badly
gassed.
After the war Aldington published several volumes of poetry including
Images 1910-1915 (1915), Images
of War (1919), A
Fool in the Forest (1925) and A
Dream in Luxembourg (1930). His successful novel, Death
of a Hero, was a psychological study of a young officer in
the First World War.
Aldington also wrote controversial biographies of the Duke
of Wellington (1946) and D. H. Lawrence
(1950) and an autobiography, Life for Life's
Sake (1940). Richard
Aldington
died in 1962.
Richard
Aldington
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Debates
The
War Poets
Richard Aldington
(1)
Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (1929)
Winterbourne
hated the war as much as ever, hated all the blather about it, profoundly
distrusted the motives of the War partisans, and hated the Army. But
he liked the soldiers, the War soldiers, not as soldiers but as men.
He respected them. He was with them. With them, because they were men
with fine qualities, because they had endured great hardships and dangers
with simplicity, because they had parried those hardships and dangers
not by hating the men who were supposed to be their enemies, but by
developing a comradeship among themselves. They had every excuse for
turning into brutes, and they hadn't done it. True, they were degenerating
in certain ways, they were getting coarse and rough and a bit animal,
but with amazing simplicity and unpretentiousness they had retained
and developed a certain essential humanity and manhood. With them, then,
to the end, because of their manhood and humanity. With them, too, because
their manhood and humanity existed in spite of the War and not because
of it. They had saved something from a gigantic wreck, and what they
had saved was immensely important - manhood and comradeship, their essential
integrity as men, their essential brotherhood as men.
(2)
Richard Aldington, In the Trenches (1917)
Not
that we are weary,
Not that we fear,
Not that we are lonely
Though never alone -
Not these, not these destroy us;
But that each rush and crash
Of mortar and shell,
Each cruel bitter shriek of bullet
That tears the wind like a blade,
Each wound on the breast of earth,
Of Demeter, our Mother, Wound us also,
Sever and rend the fine fabric
Of the wings of our frail souls,
Scatter into dust the bright wings
Of Psyche!
(3) Richard Aldington,
Impotent (1917)
Impotent,
How important is all this clamour,
This destruction and contest
Night after night comes the moon
Haughty and perfect;
Night after night the Pleiades sing
And Orion swings his belt across the sky.
Night after night the frost
Crumbles the hard earth.
Soon the spring will drop flowers
And patient creeping stalk and leaf
Along these barren lines
Where the huge rats scuttle
And the hawk shrieks to the carrion crow.