Conrad Aiken

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Conrad (Potter) Aiken (1889-1973), poet, essayist, novelist, and critic, was one of America's foremost men of letters and a major figure in American literary modernism.

In Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," a young boy named Paul withdraws from his parents, teacher, and people with authority over his life. He enters a private, autistic world in which it seems as if he were cut off from everyone else by a wilderness of silence and snow. That private world seems mysterious in a delightful way, and by the end of the story, Paul has completely enveloped himself in it. There is no sign that anyone will ever be able to reach him again.

"Silent Snow, Secret Snow" is one of Aiken's most powerful stories. One of its principal achievements lies in making the reader sense the force and pleasure that a private world like Paul's can have.

A world like that might once have been attractive to Aiken himself. He was the son of wealthy, socially prominent New Englanders who had moved to Savannah, Georgia, where his father became a highly respected physician and surgeon. But then something happened for which, as Aiken later said, no one could ever find a reason. Without warning or apparent cause, his father became increasingly irascible, unpredictable, and violent. Then, early in the morning of February 27, 1901, he murdered his wife and shot himself. Aiken (who was eleven years old) heard the gunshots and discovered the bodies.

The violent deaths of his parents overshadowed Aiken's life and writings. Throughout his life, he was afraid that, like his father, he would go insane, and, like Paul in "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," he withdrew from threats in the world around him. He disliked large gatherings and refused to give public readings from his works. He became deeply interested in psychoanalytic thought, and it became a central concern in his works.

After the tragedy, Aiken was taken to Massachusetts to live with relatives. He graduated from the Middlesex School and Harvard, where his classmates included T.S. Eliot, with whom he established a lifelong friendship. He lived in England for several years, but his main home for most of his life was Massachusetts. During his last 12 years, however, his home was the brickfront rowhouse in Savannah next to the one in which his parents died.

Aiken wrote or edited more than 50 books, the first of which was published in 1914, two years after his graduation from Harvard. His work includes novels, short stories (The Collected Short Stories appeared in 1961), criticism, autobiography, and, most important of all, poetry. He was awarded the National Medal for Literature, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the National Book Award. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, taught briefly at Harvard, and served as Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress from 1950 to 1952. He was also largely responsible for establishing Emily Dickinson's reputation as a major American poet.

The best source for information on Aiken's life is his autobiographical novel Ushant (1952), one of his major works. In this book he speaks candidly about his various affairs and marriages, his attempted suicide and fear of insanity, and his friendships with Eliot (who appears in the book as The Tsetse), Ezra Pound (Rabbi Ben Ezra), and other accomplished men.

In an interview for the Paris Review toward the end of his life, Aiken claimed that Freud's influence could be found throughout his work. In both his poetry and his fiction, Aiken tried to realize motivations buried in the subconscious. He believed that if they were left there, unspoken and unacknowledged, they could have as disastrous an effect as they had on his father's life. For Aiken, literature was a means to awareness, a route by which a man could become aware of the dark motivations hidden within himself.

Psychoanalytic thought is central in Aiken's writings. In his novel Great Circle (1933), for example, the central character has to learn to accept his past - with, of course, the help of a psychoanalyst. Blue Voyage (1927) is ostensibly about a voyage to England, but in fact the real voyage in this stream-of-consciousness novel is in the mind.

Aiken was principally successful as a poet, but his poetry has also been severely criticized. The central problem with much of the poetry is that it seems to lack great intensity. It conveys feelings of indefiniteness; emotion seems dispersed or passive. But those who criticize the poetry in this way have missed the nature of Aiken's poetic task. He cannot speak with the intensity and precision of other poets because he is, as it were, seeing and showing us things for the first time. He is dealing with aspects of man's psychology that are by their very nature indefinite and, in any precise way, undefinable. In this respect, his poetry reminds us strongly of the work of Mallarmé and other French symbolists.

Like the symbolists, Aiken is also a master of poetic music. Some poets are read less for the sound of their verse than for their ideas. Although Aiken presents grand intellectual schemes rooted in psychoanalytic thought, his greatest achievement is in the sound of his poetry - that is, in the creation of formal patterns of sound. There is great pleasure in simply reading and hearing the sound of his verse.

Aiken trained himself comprehensively in traditional English prosody, but his poetry shows little awareness of the revolutions in prosody that Pound and William Carlos Williams were effecting during his life. But the poetic effects he created are reminiscent of experiments in other arts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The sound of his poetry reminds one of the music of Debussy or, to name one of Aiken's American contemporaries, Charles Tomlinson Griffes. In painting, he reminds one of Whistler, particularly the Whistler of the Nocturnes.

Aiken sketches out moods, sensations, feelings, and attitudes with the music of his verse, but it is done as impressionistically as in, for example, Griffes' "The White Peacock" and "Nightfall." Aiken was at his best in poetic evocations of emotional and subconscious states which are better understood through suggestion than through direct statement.

Aiken's experiments with poetic music link him to some of the major poets of the New York School, particularly John Ashbery. The New York poets have generally been somewhat more experimental technically, but in the creation of "pure poetry" - poetry dependent on internal music for its unity and effect - they have clear affinities with him. Aiken should be seen in part as a transitional figure between the fin-de-si'le world of aestheticism and symbolism, on the one hand, and the poetic experiments of Ashbery and the New York School, on the other.

The magic of Aiken's poetry is in its ability to suggest through sound, image, and rhythm the things that would otherwise remain unknown to us. That accomplishment by itself places him among the most significant American poets of his generation.

Further Reading

The critical work on Aiken is vast. Reuel Denney's Conrad Aiken (1964), Frederick John Hoffman's Conrad Aiken (1962), and Jay Martin's Conrad Aiken, a Life of His Art (1962) are essential works. Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken, Joseph Killorin, ed., was published in 1978.

Additional Sources

Butscher, Edward, Conrad Aiken, poet of White Horse Vale, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.

Conrad Aiken: a priest of consciousness, New York: AMS Press, 1989.

Quotes:

"All lovely things will have an ending, All lovely things will fade and die; And youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by."

Conrad Potter Aiken
Born	Conrad Potter Aiken August 5, 1889(1889-08-05) Savannah, Georgia‹See Tfd›, USA
Died	August 17, 1973 (aged 84)
Occupation	Poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, critic
Influences T.S. Eliot

Conrad Potter Aiken (5 August 1889 – 17 August 1973) was an American novelist and poet, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, and an autobiography.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Adult years 1.3 Personal life 2 Awards and recognitions 3 Selected works 3.1 Poems 3.2 Poetry collections 3.3 Novels and Short Stories 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Early years

Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia. When Aiken was eleven years of age, his physician father killed his mother, then himself. According to his own writings, Aiken found the bodies of his parents.^[1] He was raised by his great-great-aunt in Massachusetts. Aiken was educated at private schools and at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, then at Harvard University where he edited the Advocate with T. S. Eliot who became a lifelong friend and associate.

Aiken's earliest poetry was written partly under the influence of a beloved teacher, the philosopher George Santayana. This relation shaped Aiken as a poet who was deeply musical in his approach and, at the same time, philosophical in seeking answers to his own problems and the problems of the modern world.

Adult years

Aiken was deeply influenced by symbolism, especially in his earlier works. In 1930 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Selected Poems. Many of his writings had psychological themes. He wrote the widely anthologized short story Silent Snow, Secret Snow (1934). His collections of verse include Earth Triumphant (1911), The Charnel Rose (1918) and And In the Hanging Gardens (1933). His poem Music I Heard has been set to music by a number of composers, including Leonard Bernstein and Henry Cowell.

Aiken wrote or edited more than 50 books, the first of which was published in 1914, two years after his graduation from Harvard. His work includes novels, short stories (The Collected Short Stories appeared in 1961), criticism, autobiography, and, most important of all, poetry. He was awarded the National Medal for Literature, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the National Book Award. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, taught briefly at Harvard, and served as Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress from 1950 to 1952. He was also largely responsible for establishing Emily Dickinson's reputation as a major American poet.

After 1960, when his work was rediscovered by readers and critics, a new view of Aiken emerged—one that emphasized his psychological problems, along with his continuing study of Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung, and other depth psychologists. Two of his five novels deal with depth psychology.

Personal life

Conrad and his family with Jessie McDonald lived in England, where his third child was born, from 1921 to the beginning of World War II. In 1923 he acted as a witness at the marriage of his friend the poet W. H. Davies. In 1950, he became Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, more commonly known as Poet Laureate of the United States.

Bench at grave of Conrad Aiken in Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia.

Aiken returned to Savannah for the last 11 years of his life. Aiken's tomb, located in Bonaventure Cemetery on the banks of the Wilmington River, was made famous by its mention in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the bestselling book by John Berendt. According to local legend, Aiken wished to have his tombstone fashioned in the shape of a bench as an invitation to visitors to stop and enjoy a martini at his grave. Its inscriptions read "Give my love to the world," and "Cosmos Mariner—Destination Unknown."

He was married three times: first to Jessie McDonald (1912-1929); second to Clarissa Lorenz (1930) (author of a biography, Lorelei Two); and third to Mary Hoover (1937). He was the father, by Jessie McDonald, of the English writers Jane Aiken Hodge and Joan Aiken. Aiken had three younger siblings, Kempton, Robert and Elizabeth. They were adopted by a relative and took his last name. Kempton was known as K. P. A. Taylor (Kempton Potter Aiken Taylor) and Robert was known as Robert P. A. Taylor (Robert Potter Aiken Taylor). Kempton helped establish the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

The best source for information on Aiken's life is his autobiographical novel Ushant (1952), one of his major works. In this book he speaks candidly about his various affairs and marriages, his attempted suicide and fear of insanity, and his friendships with T.S. Eliot (who appears in the book as The Tsetse), Ezra Pound (Rabbi Ben Ezra), and other accomplished men.

Awards and recognitions

Named Poetry Consultant of the Library of Congress from 1950-1952, Conrad Aiken has earned numerous prestigious national writing awards, including a National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal and the National Medal for Literature. Honored by his native state in 1973 with the title of Poet Laureate, Aiken will always be remembered in his native state as the first Georgia-born author to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1930, for his Selected Poems.

Aiken was the first winner of the Poetry Society of America (PSA) Shelley Memorial Award in 1929.

Selected works

Poems

• Morning Song of Senlin
• A Letter from Li Po
• All Lovely Things
• Beloved, Let Us Once More Praise the Rain
• Chiarascuro, Rose
• Discordants
• Evening Song of Senlin
• Hatteras Calling
• Improvisations: Light and Snow
• Music I Heard
• Nocturne of Remembered Spring
• Senlin: His Cloudy Destiny
• Senlin: His Dark Origins
• Senlin: His Futile Preoccupations
• Tetelestai
• The Carver
• The House Of Dust
• The Room
  
• The Trenches
• The Window
• Turns And Movies: Dancing Adairs
• Turns And Movies: Duval's Birds
• Turns And Movies: Rose And Murray
• Turns And Movies: The Cornet
• Turns And Movies: Violet Moore And Bert Moore
• Turns And Movies: Zudora

Poetry collections

• Nocturne of Remembered Spring: And Other Poems (Aiken, 1917)
• Selected Poems (Dickinson/Aiken, 1924)

Novels and Short Stories

• Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry (1919)
• The Jig of Forslin (1921)
• King Coffin (1935)
• Ushant (1952)
• Collected Short Stories (1960)
• A Reviewer's ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken from 1916 to the Present (1961)
• Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken (1966)

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Conrad Aiken

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Conrad Aiken

• Read Aiken's interview in The Paris Review
• Works by Conrad Aiken at Project Gutenberg
• Poems by Conrad Aiken An extensive collection of Aiken's poetry
• The House of Dust (1920)
• Conrad Aiken: Unitarian Prodigy Poet Biography
• LitWeb.net: Conrad Aiken Biography
• Conrad Aiken's Grave in Savannah, Georgia
• New Georgia Encyclopedia entry
• Index entry for Conrad Aiken at Poets' Corner
• Famous Poets and Poems, Aiken Biography
• Bookrags.com
• Libs.uga.edu
• 'Genius and need' wins prose poet Gary Young Shelley Memorial award, Guardian

v • d • e Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress Joseph Auslander (1937) · Allen Tate (1943) · Robert Penn Warren (1944) · Louise Bogan (1945) · Karl Shapiro (1946) · Robert Lowell (1947) · Léonie Adams (1948) · Elizabeth Bishop (1949) · Conrad Aiken (1950) · William Carlos Williams (1952) · Randall Jarrell (1956) · Robert Frost (1958) · Richard Eberhart (1959) · Louis Untermeyer (1961) · Howard Nemerov (1963) · Reed Whittemore (1964) · Stephen Spender (1965) · James Dickey (1966) · William Jay Smith (1968) · William Stafford (1970) · Josephine Jacobsen (1971) · Daniel Hoffman (1973) · Stanley Kunitz (1974) · Robert Hayden (1976) · William Meredith (1978) · Maxine Kumin (1981) · Anthony Hecht (1982) · Reed Whittemore (1984) · Robert Fitzgerald (1984) · Gwendolyn Brooks (1985) · Robert Penn Warren (1986) · Richard Wilbur (1987) · Howard Nemerov (1988) · Mark Strand (1990) · Joseph Brodsky (1991) · Mona Van Duyn (1992) · Rita Dove (1993) · Robert Hass (1995) · Robert Pinsky (1997) · Rita Dove / Louise Glück / W. S. Merwin (1999) · Stanley Kunitz (2000) · Billy Collins (2001) · Louise Glück (2003) · Ted Kooser (2004) · Donald Hall (2006) · Charles Simic (2007) · Kay Ryan (2008)  · Kay Ryan (2009)

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