BB. Richard Aldington

23. Comito, Terry. ‘Richard Aldington’. In British Poets, 1914-1945: Dictionary of Literary Biography 20, edited by Donald E. Stanford. Detroit: Gale, 1983.

Comito asserts that Aldington’s ‘more “Japanese” verses’ such as those gathered together as Epigrams and IMAGES (3a-b and 8) ‘apparently were inspired more by his fondness for Japanese prints than by . . . close study of such poetic forms as the haiku’, and that ‘they are closer to traditional uses of simile . . . than to Pound’s ideographic method (see BK32)’. Surely the latter point cannot be disputed, and surely Aldington did not study Japanese poetics seriously, but to suggest that the early poems are ‘inspired more’ by ukiyoe than by Japanese poetic forms is to underestimate the influence of Flint (Ap), Pound, and Binyon’s translations (see BB introduction amd BB3).