The War Poems

Abstract This chapter focuses on Aldington’s war poetry and the continued importance of classics for his work during the period 1914–1919. It categorizes any poems Aldington wrote that refer to the war as ‘war poems’, including poems he wrote before enlisting as well as those he wrote while on active service from 1916 to 1919. Aldington’s war poems merit consideration in their own right as undervalued examples of First World War poetry and, for our purposes, as exemplars of how Aldington’s ‘Hellenism’ persisted during the war and of how his experiences in the military modified that Hellenism. The chapter offers close readings of several poems, demonstrating that classical learning and literature play a double role throughout this period. They are foremost in the catalogue of things that Aldington presents as threatened with destruction, while simultaneously representing an imaginative refuge for the poet when he is overwhelmed by war’s horrors. The Hellenic world appears both as an object for which the poet fights and as an emblem of what the war has cost him, serving as the poet’s hope for continued sanity at the same time that it appears as part of what he has already lost.