Richard Aldington

This is a literary biography of Richard Aldington, founding member of the Imagist Movement, poet of the First World War, author of Death of a Hero and a biography of D.H. Lawrence. Aldington's is an extraordinary human story dealing with contemporary issues, such as confrontation of sexual mores of the day and the impact of his soldier experience on his life and work. There hasn't been a recent biography of Aldington, the only one of the war poets not to have one. With the interest in the First World War increasing as we near the centenary, the time is right for this book. This biography explores the relationships of Aldington with other prominent literary figures: Ezra Pound, Herbert Read, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and his unsuccessful marriage with H.D. This first instalment of a hopefully two-volume biography covers Aldington's life and work up to 1929. It investigates the years 1911-1915 in which Aldington helped found Modernism and formed relationships with other Modernists, the years 1916-19 when his life fell apart after his soldier experience, the years 1920-28 when he tried to re-establish his literary career, laid the foundations of modern literary criticism, and his writing of Death of a Hero at the end of the decade, a blistering attack on all that had made the war possible.