HAD you no other evidence than his books, you still could say: Here the poet is the man. His work is a record of his own spiritual experiences; and these are the experiences of a man who lives fully in his own day. He does not exclude some things because of a theory that they should not be said, or include others because it is a fashion to dote on them; and his poems are no mere rearrangement of echoes of bygone literature, chosen by the common ear of a clique, and tuned to its common fads.
The vice of modern English poetry is the pretty line and the fine-sounding word. Aldington is as sensitive to verbal beauty as anybody; but he is careful of the sense of his words, before he looks to their beauty; and, as with the word, so the line is subordinate to the poem, and the poem to the general effect of the whole work. Each one of his three books of poems has been written with a dominating idea. The theme of “Images” is the spiritual contest between imagined beauty and the outer ugliness that is thrust upon you. In this book you have poems like “To a Greek Marble” and “The Poplar,” which create a mood of loveliness; and you have others, like “Cinema Exit” and “Childhood,” which are simply statements of ugliness. The contest between these two attitudes is seen, in synthesis, in “Eros and Psyche” and in “The Faun Captive.” Images of Desire is a book of love-poems, in which the human and fallible passion of love is exalted as the only sanction for the weariness of human existence. Images of the War translates the emotions and sensations of a civilised man suddenly transported into the barbarous and crushing circumstances of modern battle.
The first book, Images, is written from a detached and intellectual standpoint; the other two from the standpoint of common humanity; but the development of the poet is continuous, and the personality revealed is an attractive one. I think of two other poets — Catullus and Horace — who lived in their own century, and left its record in their verse; and I remember the soldier — an ordinary middle-class, hard-headed Yorkshireman — at Bedford, to whom I lent the American edition of Images of the War and Desire. He spent his afternoon off-duty in his billet reading the book, instead of paddling a punt on the Ouse. The book held him. It would hold many more, but for the barrier of insincerity built up by the versifier between the people and the poet.
