Richard Aldington

Norman T. Gates

Together with a critical discussion of Aldington's contribution to modern poetry as a central figure in Imagism, this book gives bibliographical details for all of the poet's first editions and collections, texts of a hundred and seventeen uncollected poems from periodicals and unpublished manuscripts, and eighty-seven early poems omitted from Aldington's Complete Poems. This is the first book-length study of Aldington's poetry since his death in 1962. Because Aldington moved in the center of literary life in England for several decades, it also is a source of information on many of his contemporaries including Yeats, Eliot, both Lawrences, H. D.," Joyce, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams. On the bibliographical side, Mr. Gates discusses the thirty-two British and American individual volumes from which Aldington's final collection was made, as well as his contributions to the four Imagist Anthologies. After reviewing criticism of Aldington's poetry since 1910 Mr. Gates has dealt critically with each of the collected volumes by discussing individual poems and by appraising the thrust of the whole. Finally, Mr. Gates has attempted to assess Aldington's position as a poet and as a speaker for his times.

A Critical Evaluation and an Anthology of Uncollected Poems

The Poetry of Richard Aldington

In the most comprehensive selection of his letters ever published, Norman Gates allows Richard Aldington to tell the story of his life in his own words. Unlike Aldington's autobiography, Life for Life's Sake, published twenty years before his death, these letters include those two important decades of his life and do not depend upon memory. Gates provides an introduction to each of the book's five sections, sketching Aldington's biography during that decade, but the reader may then listen to Aldington's own voice speaking through his letters. Richard Aldington was married to the American poet H. D. and was a friend to many other writers and artists at the center of the Modern period. His comments on his colleagues and their work, his efforts to promote their literary fortunes, his passionate love for two wives and two mistresses, are all a part of these letters. So, too, are his experiences on the editorial staffs of the Egoist and the Criterion, which brought him to touch with European and American writers. For a clear picture of the literary world of this time, Aldington's letters are indispensable.

Norman T. Gates

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