Editor’s Pick A Fool I’ the Forest

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. Taking its title from Shakespeare’s phantasmagoric As You Like It, A Fool surveys three aspects of one character – ‘I’, Mezzetin and the Conjuror – as they struggle, and ultimately fail, to find a way to reconcile their differences and live with one another. Enriched with a fascinating introduction and explanatory notes by leading Aldington scholars Michael Copp and Elizabeth Vandiver, this centenary edition seeks to place A Fool firmly back into the canon of postwar poetry, from which it has been missing for too long.

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.