Exile and Other Poems E-Book

Richard Aldington

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 73

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

First published in 1923, Exile and Other Poems is an important, poignant collection from one of the foremost Imagist war poets. Penned after witnessing the horrors of the frontline during the First World War, Aldington's brutal, honest verse lays bare unimaginable experiences. The first part of the collection, 'Exile', explores the poet's survivor's guilt, post-traumatic stress and sense of alienation. The collection continues with a 'Songs for Puritans' and 'Songs for Sensualists', pastiches of seventeenth and eighteenth-century love poetry, and a series of more personal poems exploring the natural world, from which Aldington drew reassurance. Enriched with a fascinating introduction and explanatory notes by leading Aldington scholars Elizabeth Vandiver and Vivien Whelpton, this centenary edition seeks to place Exile firmly back on the map of war poetry, from which it has been missing for too long.

Leseprobe

EXILEAND OTHER POEMS

richard aldington

with an introduction and notes by

elizabeth vandiver

&

vivien whelpton

renard press

Renard Press Ltd

124 City Road

London EC1V 2NX

United Kingdom

[email protected]

020 8050 2928

www.renardpress.com

Exile and Other Poems first published in 1923

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2023

Exile and Other Poems © the Estate of Richard Aldington

Introduction and Notes © Elizabeth Vandiver and Vivien Whelpton, 2023

Cover design by Will Dady

ISBN: 978-1-80447-070-1

Renard Press is proud to be a climate positive publisher, removing more carbon from the air than we emit and planting a small forest. For more information see renardpress.com/eco.

The right of Richard Aldington to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, used to train artificial intelligence systems or models, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Contents

Introduction

Exile

Eumenides

Le Maudit

Bones

Meditation

In the Palace Garden

Epitaph in Ballade Form

At a Gate by the Way

Rhapsody in a Third-Class Carriage

Freedom

Retreat

Having Seen Men Killed…

Nightingale

Papillons

Truth

To Those Who Played for Safety in Life

Songs for Puritans

Songs for Sensualists

Metrical Exercises

Notes

introduction

Ben Shepherd tells us that the doctors of the First World War came to realise that ‘a man’s capacity to endure in war was determined by many things – heredity, upbringing, “character”, the society he came from, how he felt about the war, his relationship to his fellow soldiers, the length of time he had been fighting, whether his wife had been unfaithful – quite apart from the military circumstances in which he found himself.’* The influences that affected Richard Aldington’s ‘capacity to endure’ were manifold.

He had grown up in dysfunctional family circumstances. His father, a solicitor, was naïve and ineffective, and his unwise investments led to bankruptcy on two occasions; along with the public humiliation, this meant the curtailment of Richard’s education, both when he was removed from public day school at the age of thirteen and later, when he had to leave University College London after the first year of an undergraduate course. While he spent his whole life remedying his lack of a formal education, Aldington also felt the need to dissemble about it and often implied that he had received a typical public-school and university education. His mother was a much stronger character, from humbler roots, self-centred and a sensualist, who came to despise her weaker husband. Their son’s portraits of his parents in Death of a Hero (1929) and Very Heaven (1937)are savage but not entirely false. Attachment theory is a useful tool for understanding his psychological vulnerability in later life and, particularly, his inability to form a lasting marital attachment.

Indeed, his marital problems contributed to the isolation and depression he experienced throughout his war service and into the decade that followed. In the brief pre-war period when he had found his vocation as a poet and a founder of the Imagist movement, a literary circle in which he could flourish, a partner and later wife, the American poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), whom he admired and adored, and a role as assistant editor of the journal The Egoist, Aldington had thrived. War disrupted it all and was even blamed (by H.D.) for the traumatic experience – for them both – of a stillborn child in May 1915. Their physical relationship suffered in the aftermath. By 1916 conscription was on the horizon and the prospect terrified him; he sought solace in a brief extra-marital affair. By March 1918, with his second period of service at the front looming, he was immersed in a far more passionate and emotionally serious affair. In a state of misery, H.D. left London for Cornwall and the company of the composer Cecil Gray, by whom she became pregnant. Aldington was unable to cope with the notion of this child replacing the one they had lost and was torn between H.D. and his lover, Dorothy Yorke, and the couple separated in April 1919, shortly after the birth of H.D.’s daughter. Aldington would spend the next nine years with Yorke in the Berkshire countryside.

His war experience is vividly recreated in Death of a Hero (1929) and in his collection of short stories Roads to Glory (1930). After a period of training which he found utterly humiliating, he reached the Loos sector of the Western Front in January 1917. His battalion, the Eleventh Leicesters, were the Pioneers of Sixth Division – units whose tasks were to construct trenches, roads and railways, but also to serve as infantry when required to do so. The surroundings were grim, the ground dominated by slagheaps, mine works, industrial buildings and villages that were now masses of rubble. Work as a pioneer was taxing and the rear areas where they were billeted were under constant shell fire and intermittent gas bombardments. Aldington returned to England to undertake officer training in May and did not return to the front until nearly a year later, in the aftermath of the 1918 German Spring Offensive, by then commissioned as a second-lieutenant in the Ninth Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment.

The battalion was initially stationed in the same sector which he had left in the spring of 1917. In Death of a Hero he describes walking over the notorious Hill 70, captured by the Canadian corps while he was in England:

At dawn one morning when it was misty he walked over the top of Hill 91 [Hill 70], where probably nobody had been by day since its capture. The heavy mist brooded about him in a strange stillness. Scarcely a sound on their immediate front, though from north and south came the vibration of furious drum-fire. The ground was a desert of shell-holes and torn rusty wire, and everywhere lay skeletons in steel helmets, still clothed in the rags of sodden khaki or field grey. Here a fleshless hand still clutched a broken rusty rifle; there a gaping, decaying boot showed the thin, knotty foot-bones. […] Alone in the white curling mist, drifting slowly past like wraiths of the slain, with the far-off thunder of drum-fire beating the air, Winterbourne stood in frozen silence and contemplated the last achievements of civilised men.*

These images would haunt him for a long time. Meanwhile, he became an acting company commander. Now that the Germans had exhausted their reserves, the Allied advance to victory began; but in late August Aldington was sent on a six-week signals course, re-joining his battalion as its signals officer on the 8th of October to take part in the final battle of the Hindenburg Line, the Battle of Cambrai. In a period of intense mobile warfare, the retreating German army putting up a stiff resistance, the battalion captured villages to the north-east of the town and participated on the 4th of November in the advance across the River Rhonelle.

The Armistice came on the 11th of November, but Aldington’s military service did not end, as the Ninth Sussex became part of the Army of Occupation. War-weary and in poor physical health, attempting to deal at a distance with the conflict he was experiencing between his love for H.D. and his passion for Yorke and with the emotional impact of H.D.’s pregnancy, having no employment to which to return and devoid of creative inspiration, Aldington sank into a depressed state. Demobilised in February 1919, he occupied a shabby London hotel for the rest of that year and desperately tried to earn money by writing journal articles; his one stroke of good fortune was his appointment as French critic for the Times Literary Supplement. His parting from H.D. in April was abrupt and acrimonious; she would always feel that his emotional state at the time had verged on insanity. He wrote to his close friend and fellow poet F.S. Flint:

What you say about my writing is most kind, but my friend, I am going through a really desperate crisis. I have serious doubts about my talent. Everything I’ve written, everything I am writing, seems to me bad, spoiled, foolish. My poems seem stupid; my prose cliché-ridden. I must carry on writing in order to live. But I’ve lost any confidence. It’s awful. I blush each time I see my name printed on work I deem to be pathetic. […] If I had your knowledge of French literature at least I could feel less ashamed of the work I do for the Times