BB. Richard Aldington

13. The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington. London: Wingate, 1948.

In an introduction Aldington takes issue with ‘the intellectualist poetry of our time’ and cites in contrast ‘many Japanese poems’ that ‘are almost unalloyed sense impressions’. These illustrate the ‘quality of feeling’ Aldington believes a poem should strive for. His protestation that he can ‘claim no share whatever in the so-called “revolution of 1912”’ and that ‘it was a mere accident’ that his work of the period ‘chanced to meet with the approval of the verse revolutionaries’ belies the fact that for a time Aldington cultivated the role of spokesman for the Imagist movement, and borrowed extensively from Flint (Ap), Pound, and others of the ‘revolutionaries’. Of poems pertinent to this study the collection reprints the same works that had appeared in Collected Poems (11).