Richard Aldington - A Savage Style and Embitterment

A Savage Style and Embitterment

Aldington could write with an acid pen. The Georgian poets, who (Pound had decided) were the Imagists' sworn enemies, he devastated with the accusation of "'The Georgians were regional in their outlook and in love with littleness. They took a little trip for a little weekend to a little cottage where they wrote a little poem on a little theme." He took swipes at Harold Monro, whose Poetry Review had published him and given him reviewing work. On the other side of the balance sheet, he spent time supporting literary folk: the alcoholic Monro, and others such as F. S. Flint and Frederic Manning who needed friendship.

Alec Waugh, who met him through Harold Monro, described him as embittered by the war, and offered Douglas Goldring as comparison; but took it that he worked off his spleen in novels like The Colonel's Daughter (1931), rather than letting it poison his life. His novels in fact contained thinly-veiled, disconcerting (at least to the subjects) portraits of some of his friends (Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Pound in particular), the friendship not always surviving. Lyndall Gordon characterises the sketch of Eliot in the memoirs Life for Life's Sake (1941) as 'snide'. As a young man he enjoyed being cutting about William Butler Yeats, but remained on good enough terms to visit him in later years at Rapallo.

The London Times obituary in 1962 described him as an "an angry young man of the generation before they became fashionable", and who '" remained something of an angry old man to the end".