Elizabeth Vandiver

Richard Aldington's Modernist Antiquity

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 ubiquity of Classics in Aldington's writings from around 1910 to 1933 and explore the crucial role of classical receptions in his thought and his work, and second, to re-evaluate Aldington's importance in the history of Modernism in English literature in the 1910s and 1920s, and thus 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. He was one of the three founders of the Imagist movement (along with Ezra Pound and H.D.) in 1912; he advocated a style of translation that was a forerunner of Modernist translational practice; he was recognized as a significant war poet during and immediately after the First World War; and his Modernist war novel Death of a Hero (1929) was widely read and admired. In all these areas, Aldington was a central player in the development of Modernism. Nevertheless, despite an increase of critical interest in Aldington in the last few years, his importance has been generally under-recognized in literary histories of the 1910s and 1920s. This book counters that neglect by surveying Aldington's involvement in the literary culture of London during the 1910s and 1920s and by demonstrating the significance of his work as poet and critic for Imagist theory, Modernist approaches to translation, and Modernism in general. Throughout, the book establishes that Classics was crucially important for Aldington's writing in various genres, including the novels that formed the bulk of his creative output from 1929 onward, as well as for his poetry. The book includes detailed readings of many of Aldington's original poems and translations and contextualizes them through excerpts from his essays, reviews, and letters. In addition to discussing Aldington's published work, the book draws heavily on archival resources, including unpublished letters, translations, essays, prints, and poems, making many significant texts available to readers for the first time.