The Poetry of Aiken by Conrad Aiken

First published:Earth Truimphant and Other Tales in Verse, 1914; The Jig of Forslin, 1916; Turns and Movies, and Other Tales in Verse, 1916; The Charnel Rose, Senlin: A Biography, and Other Poems, 1918; Punch: The Immortal Liar, 1921; Priapus and the Pool, 1922; The Pilgrimage of Festus, 1923; Prelude, 1929; John Deth: A Metaphysical Legend, and Other Poems, 1930; Preludes for Memnon, 1931; The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones, 1931; 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; Collected Poems, 1953; A Letter from Li Po and Other Poems, 1955; Sheepfold Hill: Fifteen Poems, 1958; Selected Poems, 1961

Critical Evaluation:

A variety of qualities accounts for the complexity of Conrad Aiken’s poetry: eclecticism, mysticism, prolixity, diffusiveness, suggestiveness by implication, and, above all, a sophisticated philosophical and psychological concern. His purview may at times seem paradoxical, for he is romantic as well as classical, stoic and epicurean, optimistic and doom-stricken, joyous and despairing, assertive and diffident. Whatever his mood, his humane regard for man’s fate, along with his refusal to shrink from harsh reality, is impressive. Through all these qualities flicker the familiar gleams of his poetic inspirations. Aiken has freely and admittedly been influenced by Shakespeare, Joyce, Pound, Poe, Masters, Robinson, Eliot, Blake, Keats, and the nineteenth century Transcendentalists, to say nothing of Freud, Jung, and Krafft-Ebing.

Technically speaking, insofar as it is possible to divorce technique and substance, Aiken is usually unexceptional. By far his favorite prosodic form is blank verse, befitting of course his epic intents; this form is punctuated by cacophonies, metric irregularities, and free rhythms which provide variety of movement and counterpoint. His use of tetrameter couplets is frequent and he imitates the Shakespeare sonnet form in two sequences, “Sonnets,” and “And in the Human Heart.” He is not noteworthy for metrical experimentation save in his moving homage to Garcia Lorca, “The Poet in Granada,” the choral ode sections of “The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones,” and “The Soldier.” Though no more original, his rhetoric is more interesting because of his frequent archaisms. Floridity and excessive abstractness abound, particularly in his early work, but all his poetry is singular for its use of such romantic or classical words as gildling, lamia, perpend, cerulean, coruscation, sureate, and empyrean. What at first may seem a precious use of language is justified to some extent in descriptions of quasi-mythological kingdoms Aiken often envisions in his verse—worlds inhabited by such a real or imagined Everyman as Heliogabalus, Senlin, Festus, Forslin, and King Borborigimi. (His creation of personae, incidentally, a device he may have borrowed from Pound or Browning, is a perfect method for conveying his psychological delineations and projections.) Stylized metrics and rhetoric are only two of the features which cause some readers of Aiken’s work to describe it, and not without some reason, as vague, sentimental, prolix, and blurred by a certain romantic “softness.”

One of the most pleasing features of the Aiken style is its musicality. His phrasing, balance of lines, and alternation of rhythms prove his genius in manipulation of verbal sounds, and he employs such musicality to its greatest effect in the depiction of highly charged emotional experiences. Musical forms and instruments are constantly recurring synaesthetic images, symbols, and analogues. Aiken’s fascination with music has affected the creation of his verse in an even more basic way. In structuring his poetry, he utilizes musical forms and techniques in the hopes of attaining special effects. He writes that one of his aims is to achieve effects of contrast in both theme and tone. Sections of his longest work, “The Divine Pilgrim,” are meant to be, structurally, symphonic poems. Throughout his work, too, one finds leitmotifs, refrains, and repetitions which have the effect not only of the deja vu, but of those subtle tonal and meaning changes involved in the recurrence of words in a different context which Gertrude Stein exploited.

Beyond these technical effects are the more important substantive results of this affinity for music. Dedicated to the notion that his poetry should be suggestive of reality by means of implication, Aiken admits that he takes the evanescent, evocative aspects of emotions and things and on them, as in a series of delicate keys, plays a music that is elusive and fleeting in its overtones of improvisation and suggestion. Finally there is the simple belief of Aiken that more than any other, musical form resembles the processes of consciousness.

Aiken is, as he sees it, primarily concerned with the problem of personal identity which is for all men a life-long problem of perplexity. Thus his focus is double: upon conscious processes—steam-of-consciousness, projection, the objective-subjective duality and correspondence; and upon what the consciousness is most aware of—love and death, religion, and time. In PRELUDES FOR MEMNON he asks about self-knowledge.

A true knowledge of the self requires awareness of subconscious structure and motivation in the Freudian sense. Aiken’s psychological modernity is made clear by his constant imagistic references to the mind and its hidden features as a room, a house, a city, the sea, and a puppet stage peopled with fantasies. On the one hand man is faced with the seemingly inexorable distinction between subjective (the microcosm) and objective (the macrocosm).

What can result is an agonizing solipsism of perception and self-knowledge. But utter subjectivity and the passage of time make the world seem unsubstantial and our existence but a dream.

Aiken’s fondness for actors and other stage performers highlights his notations of the illusional aspects of experience; the psyches of his personae and his poetic version of stream of consciousness are his way of approximating the mysteries of subjectivism. On the other hand, in more expansive moments, the mind can experience a mystical exaltation wherein one becomes and is absorbed by all things. Ideally, however, one must learn all sides of inner truth.

Aiken is preoccupied with the human consciousness out of necessity as well as interest. In “The Charnel Rose” he writes that one must mold the world to shape or else be overwhelmed by it.

Aiken believes that what the modern consciousness faces is appalling. He is the humane poet who knows that sorrow is man’s constant lot in life. Much of his verse, therefore, deals with suicide, murder, death, war, and the tedium of the commonplace, but his greatest source of disillusionment is the failure of love. The Everyman hero of “The Charnel Rose” is a nympholeptic who finds peace in mysticism only after discarding love that is prostituted, carnal, erotic, unrequited, vampirish, and adulterous. Love for him is violent, bloody, and spiritually unrewarding.

A search for love is actually nothing more than one symptom of man’s historic need for an ideal in this materialistic world. The younger Aiken, in “The House of Dust,” is more romantic and ultimately places his rather ambiguous faith in a belief that life cannot exist without purpose.

The later Aiken tends to have less faith in any superintending universal purpose and is more stoical about the human condition. But like the younger Aiken, the more mature poet advocates an epicurean relish for the substance of life, however transitory. There is in his poetry the traditional concern of seventeenth century pastoral poetry for carpe diem, though for Aiken the very passage of time is what chiefly lends an air of unreality to human existence. Memory can attempt a poor mental recreation of experience, but never really can revivify it.

Aiken’s disillusionment with the failure of love is made all the more exasperating because love is the one redeeming experience in a world shorn of religious belief. Traditional religions are defunct. Hence several problems arise. Aiken asks, what exists in the world for man to admire. The existence of a universal purpose is questionable. The only solution seems to be a far from satisfying spiritual solipsism which defeats the attempt to escape psychological subjectivity.

What results is not only denial of supernatural religion, but a relentless nihilism and the moral terror of a world without standards of good and evil. “Preludes for Memnon” is the most terrifying and negativistic of Aiken’s poems in this respect; his later views are less harsh.

As an artist, Aiken’s greatest contribution is the presentation in poetic, often highly lyric, philosophic and memorable form, the psychological and epistemological dilemmas of the modern consciousness. His unique approach to verse prefigures the work of many postwar American poets.