Aldington, Richard Edward Godfrey

(1892-1962)

   With his wife, Hilda Doolittle (although the marriage didn't last), he edited The Egoist, the main channel for the Imagism movement, which was a revolt against Romanticism. His novel Death of a Hero (1929), an anti-war book, became an international best-seller. He spent time as a Hollywood script writer, but tiring of that, he returned to France. He published his autobiography, Life for Life's Sake, in 1941, and helped to translate the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mytholog y. He had a passion for truth and spoke out forcefully against hypocrisy or suppression. This led him into conflict with the establishment when in his biography Lawrence of Arabia (1955) he exposed Lawrence as a self-pitying and lying fraud. In "The Lover"-taken from his collection Images of War (1919)-he speaks of death as a lover, and how he awaits the one love from whom there is no escape. Some of his other poems: "At the British Museum," "Bombardment," "Childhood," "Daisy," "Epilogue," "Goodbye!" "Images," "Lemures," "Prelude," "Round-Pond," "The Faun Sees Snow for the First Time," "The Poplar."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Modern British Poetry. 7th rev. ed. Louis Untermeyer, ed. Harcourt, Brace, 1962. Poemhunter (www.poemhunter.com). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry. Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).