Conrad Aiken

Although he received the most prestigious of literary awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 and a National Book Award in 1954, along with the critical acclaim of some of the most respected writers and critics of his time, Conrad Aiken never became a truly popular poet. Benjamin DeMott considered possibilities for Aiken’s lack of exposure in a 1971 Saturday Review article: “the reasons for the neglect … have to do partly with this poet’s reluctance to break with certain nineteenth-century conventions of sound and posture.” Aiken noted in a letter to Malcolm Cowley that “each new book is panned—but in the background is the implication that all the previous ones were good.”

According to Richard Hauer Costa, writing in the Nation, Aiken was “at all times an ‘I’ writer. He neither could nor wished to separate his life from his work.” Aiken imbued much of his writing with psychological themes, frequently using the metaphor of a voyage to signify a journey to self-knowledge. Throughout his career, Aiken measured his characters’ progress along the voyage with a Freudian yardstick: psychological themes were sometimes explored in unconventional formal structures. 

A childhood tragedy left an indelible impression on Aiken; when he was 11, his father shot Aiken’s mother and then himself. Aiken related the circumstances of his parents’ death in his autobiography, Ushant: “after the desultory early-morning quarrel, came the half-stifled scream, and the sound of his father’s voice counting three, and the two loud pistol shots and he tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless, and apart, and, finding them dead, found himself possessed of them forever.” 

A Harvard acquaintance to whom Aiken gave great credit was Professor George Santayana. In an interview for the Paris Review, Aiken asserted that Santayana had shaped his “view of what poetry would ultimately be.” Santayana’s personal philosophy and his emphasis on the philosophical content of poetry were enormously appealing to Aiken. Other early impressions reflected in Aiken’s philosophy and writing were formed at Harvard, where he showed interest in the work of, among others, Henry and William James, Walt Whitman, the Symbolists, and the English Romantics. In 1918, for example, he wrote a dream dialogue in which Ezra Pound said, “Swinburne plus Fletcher minus Aiken equals Aiken,” and Louis Untermeyer responded, “Eliot plus Masters minus Aiken equals Aiken.” The work of T.S. Eliot, a friend from Harvard days, had had a “tremendous influence” on him, said Aiken, but there had also been “a lot of interchange” in their relationship. As Aiken phrased it, “the juices went both ways.”

Aiken produced much of his most important work in the 1920s and early 1930s, including his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Selected Poems (1930), even though this period was one of personal upheaval for the author, including a divorce from his first wife and a suicide attempt. Between 1934 and 1936, Aiken wrote under the pseudonym Samuel Jeake Jr. as London correspondent for the New Yorker. Following his 1939 divorce from his second wife and his remarriage, Aiken returned to the United States and settled in New England, where he wrote poetry mainly about the area.

Though Aiken admired many writers early in his career, that number decreased sharply with the passing years. His views, always vehement, became increasingly vitriolic. In an interview with Harvey Breit in 1950, Aiken called William Faulkner “the great American genius, the only adult writer of fiction we’ve had in the last twenty years on a major scale.” In 1969, he could name no such leader. Instead, he told Alden Whitman of the New York Times, “I think we’re going through a very depressing decline in taste. ... I don’t think there is any first-rate fiction, and I mean to include everybody in that—Nabokov, Bellow, and so on.” Poets fared no better than novelists in Aiken’s assessment of the state of writing. In 1968, he told Wilbur in the Paris Review, “I think we’ve come to a kind of splinter period in poetry. [...] some of it’s very skillful, but I don’t think there’s anywhere a major poet in the process of emerging.” Aiken also had strong words for anything resembling cliquishness. He once wrote that poets “really stink. Especially in large numbers, when herding.” 

Aiken died in 1973 in Savannah, Georgia, his birthplace. He was modest when it came to the question of his place in history. Replying to a schoolboy who had praised his work, Aiken once wrote:

No, I don’t have any great notion about where I stand as a poet. That will be taken care of by those wiser people who come later on the scene than we do. Thus, as in their turn, those opinions too will be revalued over and over. None of us knows in what direction poetry and those other arts will turn—that’s part of the cruel fascination of being interested in the arts as you are, and keeping your head about it.