Though slim, this first complete collection of Aldington's war poetry offers a concise literary history of imagism and a critical biography of Aldington. Better known as a novelist (he wrote the well-received Death of a Hero, 1929), Aldington destroyed his literary career and reputation with his unflattering biography of T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955), and has not received the attention as a leading modernist poet he deserves. The body of work is small (96 poems), but it offers a powerful expression of war experiences seen through the lens of imagism. The collection includes Images of War, which Aldington published in 1919, and his early poems, prose poems, and poetry fragments. Copp heads each section of the collection with a critical essay that offers explication and contextual commentary. Annotations are helpful (but minimal) an useful biographical notation accompanies the poems. One discovers that the poems stand on their own, regardless of their author's difficult life. Indeed, as Copp points out, Aldington's name heads the list on the Memorial to WWI Poets located in Westminster Abbey, an hour that places him with Brooke, Graves, Owen, Read, and Sassoon in crafting powerful poetic and modern expressions of war. Highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates and above.
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