Abstract
By 1925, then, Aldington was prepared to use hard words about Eliot. Yet in the early 1920s the two men were friends and intellectual allies.To explore their relationship, we must briefly move back a little in time. Before their friendship, in 1917 Eliot had praised Aldington’s prose poems in what was otherwise an all-out attack on vers libre.1 In the same year Eliot briefly echoed this praise in his well-known essay, ‘Ezra Pound, His Metric and Poetry’.2 For his part, Aldington within months of demobilisation in 1919 several times felt the impulse to convey to Eliot an admiration of his critical essays. He did write in July and praised Eliot as ‘the only modem writer of prose criticism in English’; but there was another side: ‘I feel compelled to add that I dislike your poetry very much; it is over intellectual and afraid of those essential emotions which make poetry’.3
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Notes
T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’, New Statesman, 3 March 1917, pp. 518–19.
Norman T. Gates, ‘A Chronology of Aldington’s Addresses’, in A Checklist of the Letters of Richard Aldington, does not include this address for 1919, or the fact that in March 1919 Aldington wrote letters as from 52 Doughty Street.
R.A. to T. S. Eliot, ‘Tues., 23rd’ [September 1919?] (Harvard).
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Borderline of Prose’, New Statesman, 19 May 1917, p. 158.
Richard Aldington, ‘The Sacred Wood’, Today, vol. VIII (September 1921) no. 47, pp. 191–3.
Valerie Eliot (ed.) T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcripts of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (London, 1971) p. xx.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, Dial (November 1923);
no. 75, Aldington, ‘The Influence of Mr. James Joyce’, English Review, vol. XXXII (April 1921), pp. 333–41.
Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years War (New York, 1970) p. 170.
Richard Ellman, James Joyce (London, New York and Toronto, 1965) p. 523.
James Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Letters, vol. III (London and New York, 1966) p. 69.
Selwyn Kittredge, ‘Richard Aldington’s Challenge to T. S. Eliot: The Background of their James Joyce controversy’, James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 10 (Spring 1973) no. 3, pp. 339–41.
Richard Aldington ‘The Poet and Modern Life’, Poetry, vol. XVIII (May 1921) no. 2, pp. 99–100.
Richard Aldington, ‘The Poetry of T. S. Eliot’, Outlook, (London), vol. 49 (January 1922) no. 7, pp. 12–13.
Anne Olivier Bell (ed.), The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. II: 1920–1924, (London, 1978) pp. 325–6.
Herbert Read, ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Poetry’, Criterion, vol. I (April 1923) no. 3, pp. 246–66.
Fred. D. Crawford, Mixing Memory and Desire: The Waste Land and British Novels (University Park, Pa., 1982) ch. I.
Richard Aldington, ‘Francois Villon’, Criterion, vol. IV (April 1925) no. 2, pp. 376–8; Humbert Wolfe’s review is on pp. 459–63.
‘Richard Aldington’s Letters to Herbert Read’, edited and introduced by David S. Thatcher, Malahat Review, vol. 15 (1970) pp. 5–44. See pp. 6–7.
Possibly Aldington may have circulated among these people, in any case. On 27 July 1927 Mary Campbell wrote to William Plomer that she had recently met Aldington, along with the Woolfs, at Long Barn, the home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson. (See Peter Alexander, Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography (London, 1982) p. 80. On the other hand,
Virginia Woolf wrote to T. S. Eliot just a month later, on 24 August 1927: ‘Aldington I know nothing about, so must let that thrust of yours remain unmet; but I think he belongs to the Murry world, where dog eats dog’. A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1923–1928 (London, 1977) p. 413.
Richard Aldington, ‘Mr. Eliot on Seneca’, Nation, vol. XLII, 29 October 1927, no. 4, p. 159.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, Selected Essays (London, 3rd ed., 1951) pp. 65–105.
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© 1989 Charles Doyle
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Doyle, C. (1989). Malthouse Cottage: Eliot, 1919–27. In: Richard Aldington: A Biography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10224-2_8
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