About FDU Press

Richard Aldington is now remembered more for his anti-war novel Death of a Hero (1929) than for his poetry. A follower of the Imagist school which eschewed vague abstractions and traditional metre, he believed that poems should be “hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite”. The object seen should be rendered precisely as it was in itself, free from prior associations: the outlook was, if not anti-Romantic, at least a correction to the hackneyed attitudes of post-Romanticism. Accordingly, Aldington’s war poems are plain, direct and descriptive, dependent upon rhythm rather than rhyme to make their effects. As such they contrast with the more celebrated work of Aldington’s contemporaries, Sassoon, Rosenburg and Owen. Here is the second paragraph from the prose poem Stand-To. “The last rat scuttles away; the first lark thrills with a beating of wings and song. The light is soft; deliberately, consciously, the young dawn moves. My unclean flesh is penetrated with her sweetness and she does not disdain even me.” Michael Copp is a scrupulous editor and his clear and helpful Introduction, which sets Aldington’s work in the context of his life and times, is a valuable contribution to the still reverberative literature of the First World War.