The winter evening settles down
With smells of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about his feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps,
And then the lighting of the lamps.
_Conrad Aiken_
Conrad (Potter) Aiken was born at Savannah, Georgia, August 5, 1889.
He attended Harvard, receiving his A.B. in 1912, travelled
extensively for three years, and since then, he has devoted all his
time to literature, living at South Yarmouth, Massachusetts.
The most outstanding feature of Aiken’s creative work is its rapid
adaptability and its slow growth. His first volume, _Earth
Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse_ (1914), is the Keats tradition
crossed, paraphrased (and vulgarized) by Masefield. _Turns and
Movies_ (1916) is a complete change; Masefield is exchanged for
Masters. But in the less conspicuous half of this book, Aiken begins
to speak with his true voice. Here he is the natural musician,
playing with new rhythms, haunting cadences. _The Jig of Forslin_
(1916) is an elaboration of his method. In this volume, Aiken goes
back to the narrative—or rather, to a series of loosely connected
stories—and, reinforced by studies in analytical psychology,
explores “the process of vicarious wish fulfilment by which
civilized man enriches his circumscribed life.”
_Nocturne of Remembered Spring_ (1917), _The Charnel Rose_ (1918)
and _The House of Dust_ (1920) are packed with a tired but often
beautiful music. Even though much of it is enlivened by injections
of T. S. Eliot’s conversational idiom, the effect is often moony and
monotonous. Rain seems to fall persistently through these volumes;
dust blows down the street, the shadows blur; everything dissolves
in a mist of boredom and forgetfulness. Even the poignance seems on
the point of falling asleep.
Often Aiken loses himself in this watery welter of language. In
trying to create a closer _liaison_ between poetry and music, he
gives, too frequently, so much importance to the rise and fall of
syllables that his very excess of music defeats his purpose. His
verse, thus, gains greatly on the sensuous side but loses, in its
cloying indefiniteness, that vitality and sharpness of speech which
is the very blood of poetry.
This weakening overinsistence on sound does not prevent Aiken from
attaining many exquisite effects. Primarily, a lyric poet, he
frequently condenses an emotion in a few lines; some of his best
moments are these “lapses” into tune. The music of the Morning Song
from “Senlin” (in _The Charnel Rose_) is rich with subtleties of
rhythm. But it is much more than a lyrical movement. Beneath the
flow and flexibility of these lines, there is a delightful
whimsicality, an extraordinary summoning of the immensities that
loom behind the casual moments of everyday. And in “The Fulfilled
Dream,” Aiken can divert the stream of the subconscious, whose vague
outlines he reproduces so well, to show the dream in its vivid
strength.
Besides his varied poetry, Aiken has written a quantity of criticism
of contemporary poets, the best of his reviews having been published
in _Scepticisms_ (1919), a provocative and valuable series of
studies.