Born in Boston, Aldrich was educated at Shady Hill School; Phillips Exeter Academy; Harvard College, where he won the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize for Poetry; and the Bread Loaf School of English, where he was a Robert Frost Scholar.
[1] He was the elder son of Bailey Aldrich, who served as a United States federal judge for more than 48 years.
[2] Aldrich grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent every August at the home of his grandparents in Tenants Harbor, Maine.
[5] The title poem in his first collection was first published in 1959 in a slender anthology honoring undergraduate winners of the Academy of American Poets Prize, a publication that featured early works by Sylvia Plath, George Starbuck, and Robert Rehder.
Aldrich's book-length poetic sequence Wade's Wait was the first single-author chapbook published by the Beloit Poetry Journal.