Conrad Aiken

Who Was Conrad Aiken?

Conrad Aiken was one of the most technically accomplished and emotionally complex American poets of the modernist era — a writer whose reputation has suffered an undeserved eclipse, partly because his work resists the kind of ideological appropriation that has kept lesser contemporaries in print. Born in Savannah, Georgia, he witnessed, at the age of eleven, the most formative event of his life: his father shot his mother and then himself, and young Conrad found the bodies. He spent the rest of his life writing, in increasingly elaborate formal structures, around and through that original wound.

Educated at Harvard, where he was a contemporary and friend of T.S. Eliot, Aiken developed a distinctive poetic method he called “symphonic poetry” — long, musically organized poems that use recurrent images and themes the way a symphony uses motifs, building toward resolutions that are emotional rather than propositional. His work is saturated with consciousness, with the problem of self-knowledge, with the question of what it means to inhabit a mind that cannot fully know itself.

His novel Great Circle (1933) and his autobiography Ushant (1952) return obsessively to the murder-suicide of his parents and to the question of how a person builds a self in the aftermath of primal catastrophe. His answer involves a kind of secular mysticism: the self dissolved into and reconstituted by beauty, music, and the flow of consciousness — a theology of sorts, and an illuminating one for TLA’s purposes.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Selected Poems — 1929 — Pulitzer Prize
• Preludes for Memnon — 1931
• The Kid — 1947
• Ushant — 1952 — autobiography
• Great Circle — 1933 — novel