First published in 1925, and frequently compared to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, A Fool i’ the Forest is a modernist’s poetic expression of his ongoing struggles with overcoming the trauma of military service in the First World War.
Richard Aldington (1892–1962) was an English writer and war poet associated with the Imagist movement, and his fifty-year writing career covered poetry, fiction, literary criticism and biography. Aldington joined up in 1916 and was sent to the front. Traumatised by his experiences, he sought an outlet in verse. Exile and Other Poems, first published in 1923, was his first substantial attempt to process the trauma of his experience in poetry, and stands as a monument in war poetry. Elizabeth Vandiver edited Richard Aldington’s Exile and Other Poems with Viven Whelpton and A Fool i' the Forest with Michael Copp.Michael Copp edited Richard Aldington’s A Fool i' the Forest with Elizabeth Vandiver.
