8 Richard Aldington, Images of War (1919) and Death of a Hero (1929)

Abstract

Richard Aldington is a distinctive and underrated writer. His Imagist poetry and his coruscating First World War novel Death of a Hero (1929) have continued to receive scholarly attention, but from the first assessments he has tended to be diminished by comparison to canonical modernists (Hughes 1931).Aldington was an important figure in the development and dissemination of literary modernism, and one of very few English high modernist authors. His writing about the war is both emotionally powerful and formally innovative. While there are substantial differences in form, tone and scale, Aldington returned in his great war novel to images and language he had previously used in poetry, particularly in describing bodies and landscapes (Gates 1979).