BB. Richard Aldington and Japan

	Aldington’s poems of 1911 to 1920 are central to the verse experiments of their time, and as such their reliance on principles derived from Japanese sources is an important footnote in the literary history of the period.

Richard Aldington’s earliest memories of Japan dated from 1904 or 1905, when he and other English schoolboys wore small Japanese flags in school-uniform buttonholes and prayed for Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War (15i), and soon after this, when he began reading Hearn (see D9). By 1911 he was present at Imagist gatherings in Soho, where according to Flint (A3) Japanese poetry was much discussed, and those assembled wrote tanka and haiku as ‘amusement’. Aldington’s writing in defence of Imagism does not follow Flint and Pound in invoking Japanese verse for justification, but that he drew on Japanese art and poetry in his work of the period is indisputable. He accepted Flint’s pronouncements about the importance of Japanese poetry, and incorporated into his own work Pound’s hokku-derived technique of super-position (see BK12); he patterned poems on ukiyoe in the British Museum Print Room, copied there and kept translations of Japanese poems and songs, and according to Miner (A25) carried to the battlefields of France a notebook for recording his own ‘hokku’. In later years Aldington disavowed Imagism and Modernism, and insisted disingenuously that ‘it was [by] mere accident’ that what he wrote before 1920 ‘chanced to meet with the approval of the verse revolutionaries’ of the time (12); but even then he continued to find in Japanese poetry a ‘quality of feeling’ (13) he believed missing in English verse, and in the last decade of his life his correspondence with a young Japanese scholar demonstrates continued interest in the art and literature of Japan, and continued willingness to see in these a subtlety and sophistication that Europe would do well to emulate (see 15). Aldington did not write poetry in the last decades of his life, and in the larger context of his work, as novelist, biographer, critic, and translator of considerable energy and skill, the role of Japan should not be overstated. His poems of 1911 to 1920, however, are central to the verse experiments of their time, and as such their reliance on principles derived from Japanese sources is itself an important footnote in the literary history of the period.