Conrad Aiken

Writer

• Born: August 5, 1889
• Birthplace: Savannah, Georgia
• Died: August 17, 1973
• Place of death: Savannah, Georgia

Biography

Conrad Potter Aiken (AY-kuhn) was a central figure in the American poetry renaissance of the early twentieth century. He was born in Savannah, Georgia, on August 5, 1889, the son of parents of distinguished New England ancestry. His father, William Ford Aiken, studied medicine at Harvard University and in Europe. His mother, Anna Potter Aiken, was the daughter of William James Potter, a prominent minister in New Bedford, Massachusetts, who left the Unitarian church to cofound the less sectarian Free Religious Association. For his freethinking and rationalism, Potter assumed heroic stature in many of Aiken’s works. The key event of Aiken’s life occurred when his father fatally shot himself and his wife in February 1901. The tragedy’s effects on the development of Aiken’s personality are analyzed, often through elaborate dream sequences, in much of his writing. Following the deaths of his parents, Aiken was separated from his two younger brothers and sister to be reared by relatives in New Bedford and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Aiken entered Harvard University in 1907, where he became a close and lifelong friend of T. S. Eliot. As a student, Aiken was deeply influenced by the naturalistic rationalism of George Santayana, who argued that the greatest poetry was philosophical, capable of expressing a coherent worldview based upon a knowledge of contemporary scientific and humanistic thought.

Aiken’s first book of poetry, Earth Triumphant, and Other Tales in Verse, appeared in 1914, and his criticism began to appear in 1915. Before 1925, Aiken published ten volumes of poetry and some one hundred critical essays. Aiken’s most important works prior to the early 1920s were his five verse “symphonies”: The Charnel Rose, The Jig of Forslin, Senlin: A Biography, and Other Poems, The House of Dust, and The Pilgrimage of Festus (published together as The Divine Pilgrim in 1949). Alternately musical, fragmented, dreamlike, morbid, and erotic, these long poems were designed to depict progressive stages in the development of consciousness, essentially along Freudian lines, and to tell the story of Aiken’s life.

As a critic, Aiken warred with the Imagists and such popular anthologizers and editors as Harriet Monroe, Louis Untermeyer, and Amy Lowell. Because he had no use for nationalistic themes, poetic cliques, manifestos, schools, or prizes, Aiken tended to distance himself from the popular poetic trends of his time. He repeatedly argued for “scientific” critical standards. Aiken was the first Freudian critic; he praised Walt Whitman and championed Emily Dickinson. In “The Impersonal Poet,” he expressed every major tenet of Eliot’s seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which appeared in The Sacred Wood (1920).

Beginning in the early 1920s, Aiken, in such short lyrics as “Cliff Meeting” and “Sea Holly,” began to write in a voice that finally expressed his anguished vision of deterministically fused subjective and objective realms. At the same time, he also turned to the short story, where he proved himself to be a master of psychological realism, particularly in the depiction of compulsive behavior and parent-child relationships, as in “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.”

Aiken moved with his first wife, Jessie McDonald—whom he had married in 1912, and their first two children to England in 1921. Isolated and believing himself a failure, he began in 1924 to write Blue Voyage, an autobiographical stream-of-consciousness novel that profoundly influenced Malcolm Lowry. Great Circle, Aiken’s second novel, further explores both his childhood and the breakup of his first marriage. Much like his two first novels, Aiken’s most powerful poems, Preludes for Memnon and Time in the Rock: Preludes to Definition, were written in the period surrounding his first divorce in 1928, his second marriage in 1930, his suicide attempt in 1932, and his second divorce and third marriage in 1937. In these poems, Aiken analyzes the biological causes and artistic implications of his own compulsive personality. His best-known collection, Selected Poems, won the Pulitzer Prize.

From the urbane Brownstone Eclogues, and Other Poems of 1942 until his death in 1973, Aiken’s poetry celebrated both his New England ancestry and the American scene. Sheepfold Hill: Fifteen Poems contains Aiken’s most explicit and nostalgic ancestral memoirs. From 1950 to 1952, he was poetry consultant at the Library of Congress (now the US poet laureate), during which time he wrote his postmodernist, highly confessional autobiography, Ushant: An Essay. His 1955 collection, Collected Poems, won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

Despite the quality and quantity of his work, Aiken did not receive the critical recognition afforded his contemporaries T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Aiken’s early disputes with editors and other poets contributed to his reputation as a loner. By his own admission, much of his earliest verse was derivative and flawed. Moreover, as a modernist, Aiken sought to be cosmic at the wrong historical juncture. His lifelong quest to develop a workable Darwinian and Freudian theory of the “evolution of consciousness” marks Aiken as one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century.

Author Works

Poetry

Earth Triumphant, and Other Tales in Verse, 1914

Turns and Movies, and Other Tales in Verse, 1916

The Jig of Forslin, 1916

Nocturne of Remembered Spring, and Other Poems, 1917

The Charnel Rose, 1918

Senlin: A Biography, and Other Poems, 1918

The House of Dust, 1920

Punch: The Immortal Liar, 1921

Priapus and the Pool, 1922

The Pilgrimage of Festus, 1923

Changing Mind, 1925

Priapus and the Pool, and Other Poems, 1925

Prelude, 1929

Selected Poems, 1929

John Deth: A Metaphysical Legend, and Other Poems, 1930

Gehenna, 1930

The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones, 1931

Preludes for Memnon, 1931

And in the Hanging Gardens, 1933

Landscape West of Eden, 1934

Time in the Rock: Preludes to Definition, 1936

And in the Human Heart, 1940

Brownstone Eclogues, and Other Poems, 1942

The Soldier: A Poem by Conrad Aiken, 1944

The Kid, 1947

Skylight One: Fifteen Poems, 1949

The Divine Pilgrim, 1949

Wake II, 1952

Collected Poems, 1953, 1970

A Letter from Li Po, and Other Poems, 1955

The Fluteplayer, 1956

Sheepfold Hill: Fifteen Poems, 1958

Selected Poems, 1961

The Morning Song of Lord Zero, 1963

A Seizure of Limericks, 1964

Cats and Bats and Things with Wings: Poems, 1965

The Clerk’s Journal, 1971

A Little Who’s Zoo of Mild Animals, 1977

Long Fiction

Blue Voyage, 1927

Great Circle, 1933

King Coffin, 1935

A Heart for the Gods of Mexico, 1939

Conversation: Or, Pilgrim’s Progress, 1940

The Collected Novels of Conrad Aiken, 1964

Short Fiction

Bring! Bring! and Other Stories, 1925

Costumes by Eros, 1928

Among the Lost People, 1934

Short Stories, 1950

Collected Short Stories, 1960

Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, 1966

Drama

Mr. Arcularis: A Play, pb. 1957 (first pr. as Fear No More, 1946)

Nonfiction

Skepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry, 1919

Ushant: An Essay, 1952

A Reviewer’s ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken from 1916 to the Present, 1958

Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken, 1978

Edited Texts

A Comprehensive Anthology of American Poetry, 1929, 1944

Twentieth Century American Poetry, 1944

Bibliography

Aiken, Conrad. Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken. Edited by Joseph Killorin. Yale UP, 1978. Includes a representative sample of 245 letters (from some 3,000) written by Aiken. A cast of correspondents, among them T. S. Eliot and Malcolm Lowry, indexes to Aiken’s works and important personages, and a wealth of illustrations, mostly photographs, add considerably to the value of this volume.

Butscher, Edward. Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale. U of Georgia P, 1988. The first installment of a projected two-volume psychobiography focuses on the years 1899-1925. Includes information about Aiken’s childhood in Savannah, Georgia, and Massachusetts, his years at Harvard University, and his friendships and involvements with other poets, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Amy Lowell. Also analyses and traces the development of Aiken’s literary works.

Cowley, Malcolm. “Conrad Aiken: From Savannah to Emerson.” New England Writers and Writing, edited by Donald W. Faulkner. UP of New England, 1996. This essay discussing Aiken’s work and its relation to New England is part of a collection of essays that analyze nineteenth and twentieth century authors from that region.

Dirda, Michael. “Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken.” The Washington Post, 25 June 1978, p. G5. A review of Aiken’s Selected Letters, with a brief biographical sketch; suggests that the letters will help redress the neglect Aiken has suffered.

Hoffman, Frederick J. Conrad Aiken. Twayne, 1962. Presents a useful overview of Aiken’s work and examines his attitude toward New England, his obsession with “aloneness,” and his concern about human relationships. Contains a chronology, a biographical chapter, and an annotated bibliography.

Lorenz, Clarissa M. Lorelei Two: My Life with Conrad Aiken. U of Georgia P, 1983. Aiken’s second wife discusses the 1926-1938 years, the period when he wrote his best work. Covers his literary acquaintances, his work habits, and the literary context in which he worked. Well-indexed volume also includes several relevant photographs.

Malone, Tyler. "Is It Time to Rediscover Conrad Aiken?" The Los Angeles Times, 13 Apr. 2017, www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-conrad-aiken-20170413-story.html. Accessed 1 May 2017. Describes the critical reception of Aiken's work and argues that his poetry and other writings did not received the critical acclaim or recognition that they deserve.

Seigel, Catharine F. The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken: A Celebration of Consciousness. Northern Illinois UP, 1993. Features chapters on the Freudian foundation of Aiken’s fiction, on his New England roots, and on many of his novels. Concluding chapters discuss Aiken’s autobiography Ushant and provide an overview of his fiction. Includes notes, selected bibliography, and index.

Spivey, Ted R. Time’s Stop in Savannah: Conrad Aiken’s Inner Journey. Mercer UP, 1997. Examines Aiken’s life and works to uncover his literary, spiritual, and psychological development. Describes how he used his writing as a way to heal the pain of his parents’ deaths.

Spivey, Ted R., and Arthur Waterman, eds. Conrad Aiken: A Priest of Consciousness. AMS Press, 1989. Focuses on Aiken’s poetry but includes information on his novels. Provides an extensive chronology of Aiken’s life and a lengthy description of the Aiken materials housed at the Huntington Library.

Womack, Kenneth. “Unmasking Another Villain in Conrad Aiken’s Autobiographical Dream.” Biography 19 (Spring, 1996): 137. Examines the role of British poet and novelist Martin Armstrong as a fictionalized character in Aiken’s Ushant and argues that Aiken’s attack on Armstrong is motivated by revenge for Armstrong’s marriage to Aiken’s first wife.