Recovering from War

Abstract This chapter considers the poetry Aldington wrote in the 1920s, as he grappled with the aftermath of the war and the survivor’s guilt that continued to torment him. The chapter begins by describing Aldington’s state of mind after demobilization, when he suffered from PTSD, and recounts the circumstances of his separation from H.D. It gives close readings of key poems from the 1923 collection Exile and Other Poems and of several prose poems written immediately after the war and printed in the 1926 collection The Love of Myrrhine and Konallis: And Other Prose Poems. The chapter pays particular attention to Aldington’s long modernist poem A Fool i’ the Forest (1925), which is often compared to The Waste Land, and offers the first in-depth analysis of the role of classical references and allusions in that poem. The chapter also discusses Aldington’s use of Sophocles’ Philoctetes as a constant point of reference in his poem The Eaten Heart (1929). Throughout, the chapter discusses how classics provided Aldington with a framework for articulating some of the emotions that he struggled with in the decade between the war’s end and his writing of his modernist war novel Death of a Hero (1929).