Richard Aldington: A Biography - Hardcover

Doyle, Professor Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809315661 ISBN 13: 9780809315666

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Synopsis

Perhaps best known today for Death of a Hero, which Orwell judged as the best novel of the First World War. Richard Aldington was a contemporary and friend of Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot. With Pound, Aldington and his wife, the American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), founded the Imagist movement in 1912. Notable as a poet, translator, novelist and biographer, Aldington was also a major figure of the Modernist era. This detailed biography, the first to be published, includes a critical appraisal of his major writings.

From the late 1930s Aldington lived in the United States, working first on his major anthology Poetry of the English-Speaking World and then on his prize-winning biography, The Duke (on Wellington). His later works included a study of D. H. Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius, But . . and two controversial biographical studies, Pinorman and Lawrence of Arabia. Friends of his later years included Lawrence Durrell, Roy Campbell, Henry Williamson and Alister Kershaw.

Aldington was first and foremost an individualist, who had no time for bureaucracy or politics, including Communism. Nonetheless, since the early 1930s, when the Russian translation of Death of a Hero was praised by Maxim Gorky, Aldington has been rated in Russia as one of the foremost English-language writers of the 20th century. Three weeks before his death in July 1962, Aldington made a triumphal Russian tour as guest of the Soviet Writers’ Union.

 

 

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Doyle is Professor of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He has also lectured at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is a poet, editor, critic and biographer and has written on political subjects. His previous publications include James K. Baxter, Stonedancer, William Carlos Williams: The Critical Heritage, William Carlos Williams and the American Poem, A Steady Hand, The New Reality: The Politics of Restraint in British Columbia, Wallace Stevens: The Critical Heritage and After Bennett: A New Politics for British Columbia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0809315661
• ISBN 13: 9780809315666
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 420