Poets From England

"Men smell of leather. … The leather of huntsmen, furniture movers, porters."

"Just once in my life a man tried to embrace me. It was horrible! He had big boots, a heavy belt, huge gloves. Faugh! Oh, let's not talk about men."

"The thief upon the cross and the beloved John were alike complete in Christ."

"I was born under an unlucky star. I love France and I am not French. I am English and I can't like England. My father was Scotch, my mother was born in Honolulu. My father, William Tarn, died at the age of forty in 1890. My real name is Pauline Tarn. I changed it to Renée Vivien."

"I'm not logical. I'm infected with the romantic fever. It began in my teens when I read Baudelaire in secret, in a country boarding school in England from which I slipped away by climbing over the wall. I was fifteen, the same age as Juliet--a Juliet for whom Romeo had no attraction."

"When I re-read my past work I can see a development to such an effect, indeed, that some of them no longer seem to be any part of me."

"It was a yellow voice, a high, shrill treble in the nursery White always and high, I remember it so, White cupboard, off-white table, mugs, dolls’ faces And I was four or five. The garden could have been Miles away. We were taken down to the green Asparagus beds, the cut lawn, and the smell of it Comes each summer after rain when white returns. Our bird, A canary called Peter, sang behind bars. The black and white cat Curled and snoozed by the fire and danger was far away."

"Poets work upon and through each other."

"Richard Aldington has always been accepted in Russia, and still is, as a many-sided figure, a rounded personality. Articles have been written about him as a poet and a novelist, a translator and a critic, a man and a writer; the content of his works has been discussed and also their form, his works as a whole and individual books, and articles, studies, reviews and notices about him have appeared in works published in Moscow and Leningrad, in journals and in newspapers published in other cities. Papers have been read about him, lectures given, and students have written essays on him. His books have reached every part of our large country. And—what is even more important—his books are read. Our older and younger generations know Richard Aldington. He lives in our memory."

"Over thirty years, large numbers of copies of Richard Aldington's works have been printed. In 1935, Death of a Hero and in 1937 All Men are Enemies ran to 10,000 copies. In the second half of the fifties and at the beginning of the sixties, the situation changed dramatically. The number of copies printed of the 1961 edition of Death of a Hero was ten times as large (100,000 copies). All Men are Enemies ran to 225,000 copies (Goslitizdat) and was also published in Smerdlovsk, by a local publishing house which printed around 100,000 copies. These books did not lie round in the bookshops—they were sold literally in a few days, and now it is impossible to find them in the shops—not one reader has offered to sell to a second-hand bookseller, evidently because people do not want to part with them. When Richard Aldington's friend, Mr. Alister Kershaw, asked me to send him old Russian editions of the writer and I tried to get them from the second-hand booksellers, I was told, "There are neither old ones nor new ones to be had.""

"Richard Aldington is exactly the same inside, murder, suicide, rape—with a desire to be raped very strong—same thing really—just like you—only he doesn't face it, and gilds his perverseness."

"I well remember that first meeting. We had lunch together and then strolled up Charing Cross Road, looking at the bookshops and talking about our literary enthusiasms. Aldington looked very handsome in his uniform and I was immediately captivated by the brightness and candour of his features—a boyishness, one might call it, which he retained perhaps all his life, certainly until he left Europe. He was one of the most stimulating friends I have ever had—easy in conversation and very frank, full of strange oaths (mostly in French), his mind darting about rapidly from one aspect of a subject to another."

"It is true that the war occupies only the third part of the novel [Death of a Hero]. But it was perhaps the first of the "angry young men's" novels; it is fine one: and it is interesting to compare Aldington's picture of the pre-war generation with Sassoon's."

"Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill."

"Death of a Hero is a very angry novel; virulent is perhaps a better adjective... There is nothing Aldington does not view in hellish images. One has the impression of reading the testimony of a madman."

"I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant..Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre."

"I dream of silent verses where the rhyme Glides noiseless as an oar."

"I have little to say in favour of Pinorman, and nothing in defence of the book about Lawrence. But Aldington wrote a book about the other Lawrence which is first-class. Death of a Hero was not the first of the books proclaiming the disillusion of the generation which fought the First World War but it was in the vanguard. And a man who has written such other novels as All Men are Enemies and Women Must Work; whose poems include A Fool i' the Forest and A Dream in the Luxembourg; who has one of the best single volumes on Voltaire to his credit; and whose other work ranges from French Studies and Reviews to translations of Alcestis and Fifty Romance Lyric Poems cannot be dismissed so easily."

"By the sense of mystery I understand the experience of certain places and times when one's whole nature seems to be in touch with a prescence, a genius loci, a potency."

"Why do we call ourselves 'Imagists'. Well why not? Well I think it is a very good and descriptive title and it serves to enunciate some of the principles we mos firmly believe in... Direct treatment of the subject... as few adjectives as possible... a hardness, as of cut stone... individuality of rhythm..."

"When hope lies dead—ah, when 'tis death to live, And wrongs remembered make the heart still bleed, Better are Sleep's kind lies for Life's blind need Than truth, if lies a little peace can give."

"Man's knowledge, save before his fellow man, Is ignorance—his widest wisdom folly."

"We looked o'er London, where men wither and choke, Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies, And lore of woods and wild wind prophecies, Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke."

"Theodore Watts, as he told me twenty years ago, holds the opinion that Shakespeare wrote private poetry in a separate book while composing his dramas, and that he gave such portions of it as he could make fit, to certain of his characters. He thought, if I remember aright that the soliloquy and the dagger-scence were morsels of this sort. It certainly must strike one that the "the law's delay" and "the insolence of office" were not prominent grievances in Hamlet's career."

"Yon silvery billows breaking on the beach Fall back in foam beneath the star-shine clear, The while my rhymes are murmuring in your ear A restless lore like that the billows teach; For on these sonnet-waves my soul would reach From its own depths, and rest within you, dear, As, through the billowy voices yearning here Great nature strives to find a human speech.A sonnet is a wave of melody: From heaving waters of the impassion'd soul A billow of tidal music one and whole Flows in the "octave"; then, returning free, Its ebbing surges in the "sestet" roll Back to the deeps of Life's tumultuous sea."

"Here he is. All the way from Salford. He's not my cup of tea but you might like him."

"One of the things that is his inability to contact him. He's never had a 'phone. And before the days when mobile 'phones were popular you had to 'phone his mam....."

"As a card-carrying nosey-parker and professional obsessive, I read up on the subject and learned that Baudelaire was a real pernickety dresser and a bit of a dude; this was my kind of guy. I too would be an Urban Poet."

"Having been a tubercular kid with a malformed physique, I have a dread of any situation where the shedding of garments might be required. I can't even swim."

"Marcel was a modern-day Robin Hood; he would rob from the rich because the poor have no money."

"I told my dad, who quizzed me about what kind of purse I might reasonably expect for this performance. I told him it was a benefit, all in a good cause, and that I wasn't the only one working for nothing. 'Nothing?' he replied. 'Anybody will employ you for nothing'."

"I soon got a job as a fire-watcher at the Royal Naval Dockyard, the main employer in Plymouth. If anybody asked how many people worked there, the answer was always the same: about ten per cent."

"[on his Dad] He didn't share the general public's dim view of the late Joseph Stalin."

"[on the fear of a nervous breakdown] I don't think I ever lost this fear. It turned me into a default existentialist by the time I was six: I quickly learned that the pursuit of happiness is largely pointless, happiness being the only target one merely has to aim at in order to miss."

"This guy was going to marmalise me! I mean, where's the kudos in beating up a seven-stone fucking consumptive? I was a self-confessed coward, then as now. My coat of arms has been detailed elsewhere: four white feathers on a field of yellow. Nothing for me is more terrifying than physical pain...."

"All my life, all I wanted to be was a professional poet. To me being a professional poet was better than notching up a hat trick at Old Trafford.....You get to wear fine clothes and perfume and nobody pulls you up on it. You get out of bed late in the day and nobody calls you a lazy bastard. A state of reverie and the virtue of idleness are paramount. Any poet will tell you this."

"My paternal grandfather, George, had been a regular soldier in India until chucking-out time in 1948, and funnily enough bore an uncanny resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi (who apparently suffered from corns and bad breath, in other words a supercallousedfragilemysticplaguedwithhalitosis, as Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke almost sang)."

"You know, like they say: never trust a thin chef, or a doctor with leprosy."

"Have I seen Schindler's List? I was on Schindler's list - Dr Schindler my dentist that is."

"I was met with the poet’s greatest enemy; indifference."

"It was quite a tough school. Put it this way, we had our own coroner."

"My advice to any poet; you have to be idle to write it. A pen, a notebook and idleness, those are the three requisites for the manufacture of poetry."

"Everyone thinks they'll make a better judge than any judge don't they? You see these nonces getting off with a six quid fine and being given a house next door to a school. And you think 'I wouldn't have done that'."

"[Luxury item] A boulder of opium twice the size of my own head."

"At some point, the Mod look had a short-lived Country Life moment, when the gorgeous mohair sheen of the three-button suit gave way to matte autumnal earth tones. Give it a name: fucking brown."

"Never leave a bookies with a smile on your face."

"[Johnny Cash] was in and out with a caution; I had a residential thing going on for Her Majesty's pleasure. So I missed a golden opportunity there while the man in black was still alive, I could have gone up to him and said, 'Eh Johnny, get over it! Some of us have done some serious bird'."

"I'm a short-term nostalgic; things were great ten minutes ago. If only I could go back there. At my time of life I suffer from déjà vu and amnesia at the same time; I can't remember what happens next."

"I always judge people by appearances; don't you anyway? I think clothes are important; that's where the nudist camp falls down."

"...she took us out on a motor ride to a beach, it was a nudist camp.....What those people do on their time off is their own business, the dirty bastards."