“They fell to pieces at a touch”: Richard Aldington, the First World War and the male body

Frayn, Andrew

Abstract

Richard Aldington’s poems in Images of War (1919) return insistently to the impact of the First World War on the male body. Drawing on theoretical work about bodies in war such as Joanna Bourke’s Dismembering the Male (1996), I argue that Aldington’s description of individual body parts represents the fragmentation, dehumanisation and alienation of modern life, as with many modernist poets, but also illustrates the violence done to the body politic by the conflict. His violent critique of mass culture in his earlier Imagist London poems such as ‘Cinema Exit’ and ‘In the Tube’ is given stark focus by the experience of warfare, which means literal mutilation and decay. The matter-of fact conversation in ‘Trench Idyll’ ends by discussing the gruesome job of taking identity discs from long-dead men caught on the barbed wire, while ‘In the Trenches’ addresses the psychological torment of the constant proximity to violent death. The war’s impact is registered on the body, but also in the act of writing poetry itself. ‘Sorcery of Words’ illustrates Aldington’s self-consciousness about the act of writing poetry during and immediately after the conflict. In it, he considers the validity in wartime of this form of expression, with its associations of elevated and formal language, the representation of beauty, and abstract thought. There is a sense, Aldington suggests, in which that incongruity is wholly apposite, although his struggles through the 1920s to write creatively indicate that the issue became little easier with the benefit of hindsight.

Citation

Frayn, A. (2018, July). “They fell to pieces at a touch”: Richard Aldington, the First World War and the male body. Paper presented at International Richard Aldington Society Conference, Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: International Richard Aldington Society Conference
• Start Date: Jul 30, 2018
• End Date: Aug 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: Apr 26, 2023