Edinburgh Napier University

  Richard Aldington’s city poems in the latter part of his 1915 collection Images
are concerned with the masses who inhabit the modern city. Aldington is
at pains to stress his distinction from those he perceives as an increasingly
homogenized crowd. This paper examines the literary, linguistic and rhetorical
strategies by which Aldington ‘others’ the masses, and sets them in the context
of contemporary studies of the crowd, focusing on the work of Gustave Le Bon
and C. F. G. Masterman. Aldington’s poetry is a product of the environment
he sees as unsatisfactory, but he searches for solutions in a range of literary
traditions which write the city.