BB. Richard Aldington

9. Images of War: A Book of Poems. London: Allen and Unwin, 1919. Enlarged as War and Love (1915-1918). Boston: Four Seas, 1919.

Both poems noted are reprinted in 11 and 13.

a. Insouciance. Aldington acknowledges in a letter to Miner (14) that the poem has ‘something of the hokku idea’. Miner (A25) points out that the ‘something’ is Pound’s technique of super-position (see BK12). Appeared first in Poetry in July 1919.

b. Living Sepulchres. ‘One frosty night when the guns were still / I leaned against the trench / Making for myself hokku / Of the moon and flowers and of the snow. // But the ghostly scurrying of huge rats / Swollen with feeding upon men’s flesh / Filled me with shrinking dread.’