= Conrad_Aiken =

======================================================================
= Conrad_Aiken =
======================================================================

Introduction
======================================================================
Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 - August 17, 1973) was an American
writer and poet, honored with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book
Award, and was United States Poet Laureate from 1950 to 1952. His
published works include poetry, short stories, novels, literary
criticism, a play, and an autobiography.

Early years
=============
Aiken was the eldest son of William Ford and Anna (Potter) Aiken. In
Savannah, Aiken's father became a respected physician and eye surgeon,
while his mother was the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts
Unitarian minister. For the first eleven years of Aiken's life, his
family lived at 228 East Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah.

On February 27, 1901, William Ford Aiken murdered his wife and then
committed suicide. According to his 1952 autobiography, 'Ushant',
Aiken, then 11 years old, heard the two gunshots and discovered the
bodies immediately thereafter. After his parents' deaths, he was
raised by his great-aunt and uncle in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
attending Middlesex School, then Harvard University.

At Harvard, Aiken edited the 'Advocate' with T. S. Eliot, who became a
lifelong friend, colleague, and influence. It was also at Harvard
where Aiken studied under another significant influence in his
writing, the philosopher George Santayana.

Adult years
=============
Aiken was strongly 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 strong psychological
themes. He wrote the widely anthologized short story "Silent Snow,
Secret Snow" (1934), partially based on his childhood tragedy.

Other influences were Aiken's grandfather, Potter, who had been a
church preacher, as well as Whitman's freestyle poetry. This helped
Aiken shape his poetry more freely while his recognition of a God
grounded his more visually rich explorations into the universe. Some
of his best-known poetry, such as "Morning Song from Senlin", uses
these influences to great effect.

His collections of verse include 'Earth Triumphant' (1914), '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, Henry Cowell, and Helen Searles
Westbrook. Aiken wrote or edited more than 51 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), reviews, an autobiography, and poetry. He
received numerous awards and honors for his writing, though for most
of his lifetime, he received little public attention.

Though Aiken was reluctant to speak of his early trauma and ensuing
psychological problems, he acknowledged that his writings were
strongly influenced by his studies of Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung,
Otto Rank, Ferenczi, Adler, and other depth psychologists. It was not
until the publication of his autobiography, 'Ushant', that Aiken
revealed the emotional challenges that he had battled for much of his
adult life. During the 1920s Freud heard of him and offered to
psychoanalyze him. While aboard a Europe-bound ship to meet with
Freud, Aiken was discouraged by Erich Fromm from accepting the offer.
Consequently, despite Freud's strong influence on Aiken, Aiken never
met the noted psychoanalyst. As he later said, "Freud had read 'Great
Circle', and I'm told kept a copy on his office table. But I didn't
go, though I started to. Misgivings set in, and so did poverty."

Personal life
===============
Aiken had three younger siblings, Kempton Potter (K. P. A. Taylor),
Robert Potter (R. P. A. Taylor), and Elizabeth. After their parents'
deaths, the four children were adopted by Frederick Winslow Taylor and
his wife Louise, their great-aunt. His siblings took Taylor's last
name. Kempton helped establish the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern
American Poetry.

He was married three times: firstly to Jessie McDonald (1912-1929);
secondly to Clarissa Lorenz (1930-1937) (author of a biography,
'Lorelei Two'); and thirdly to the painter Mary Hoover (1937-1973). He
fathered three children by his first wife Jessie: John Aiken, Jane
Aiken Hodge and Joan Aiken, all of whom became writers. Over the
years, he served 'in loco parentis' as well as mentor to the English
author Malcolm Lowry.

Aiken married Jessie McDonald in 1912, and the couple moved to England
in 1921 with their older two children; John (born 1913) and Jane (born
1917), settling in Rye, East Sussex (where the American novelist Henry
James had once lived). The couple's youngest daughter, Joan, was born
in Rye in 1924. Conrad Aiken returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as
a tutor at Harvard from 1927 to 1928. For many years, he divided his
time between Rye, New York, and Boston. In 1931 he was introduced by
the artist Paul Nash to Edward Burra, a painter also living in Rye.
That year Burra painted his gouache "John Deth", inspired by Aiken's
poem of that name and originally intended to illustrate a projected
edition that was never realized. Nevertheless, the two men maintained
a lifelong friendship thereafter.

In 1936, Aiken met his third wife, Mary, in Boston. In the following
year the couple visited Malcolm Lowry in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where
Aiken divorced Clarissa and married Mary. The couple moved to Rye,
where they remained until the outbreak of World War II in 1940. The
Aikens settled in Brewster, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where he and
his wife Mary later ran a summer program for writers and painters
named after their antique farmhouse, "Forty-One Doors". Despite living
for many years abroad and receiving recognition as a Southern writer,
Aiken always considered himself an American, and, in particular, a New
Englander.

In 1923, he acted as a witness at the marriage of his friend, poet W.
H. Davies. From 1950 to 1952, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in
Poetry to the Library of Congress, more commonly known as Poet
Laureate of the United States. In 1960, he visited Grasmere in the
Lake District, England (once the home of William Wordsworth), with his
friend Edward Burra.

The Aikens lived primarily at their farmhouse in West Brewster and
wintered in Savannah in a home adjacent to his early childhood house.

Aiken died on 17 August 1973, aged 84, and was buried in Bonaventure
Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, on the banks of the Wilmington River.
His widow was buried beside him after her death in 1992. The burial
site was featured in 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' 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. The bench is inscribed with "Give my
love to the world" and "Cosmos Mariner--Destination Unknown".

A primary source for information on Aiken's life is his
autobiographical novel 'Ushant' (1952), one of his major works. In it,
he wrote 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), Malcolm Lowry (Hambo), and others.

Awards and recognition
======================================================================
Named Poetry Consultant (now U.S. Poet Laureate) of the Library of
Congress from 1950 to 1952, Aiken earned numerous prestigious writing
honors, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for 'Selected Poems', the
1954 National Book Award for 'Collected
Poems',[https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-1954
"National Book Awards - 1954"]. National Book Foundation. Retrieved
2012-03-02.
(With acceptance speech by Aiken and essay by Evie Shockley from the
Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the
National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Poetry, and a
National Medal for Literature. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship
in 1934, Academy of American Poets fellowship in 1957, Huntington
Hartford Foundation Award in 1960, and Brandeis University Creative
Arts Award in 1967. Aiken was the first Georgia-born author to win a
Pulitzer Prize, and was named Georgia's Poet Laureate in 1973. He was
the first winner of the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial
Award, in 1929. In 1973, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in
Literature but died months earlier before his only chance to be
awarded.

In 2009, the Library of America selected Aiken's 1931 story "Mr.
Arcularis" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American
fantastic tales.

Poetry collections
====================
* '[https://archive.org/details/earthtriumphant00aikerich Earth
Triumphant]' (Aiken, 1914)
* '[https://archive.org/details/cu31924022232338 Turns and Movies and
other Tales in Verse]' (Aiken, 1916, Houghton Mifflin)
* 'The Jig of Forslin: A Symphony', 1916
* '[https://archive.org/details/nocturneofrememb00aike Nocturne of
Remembered Spring: And Other Poems]' (Aiken, 1917)
* '[https://archive.org/details/charnelrosesenli00aikeuoft Charnel
Rose]' (Aiken, 1918)
* 'The House of Dust: A Symphony', 1920
* 'Punch: The Immortal Liar, Documents in His History', 1921
* 'Priapus and the Pool', 1922
* 'The Pilgrimage of Festus', 1923
* 'Priapus and the Pool, and Other Poems', 1925
* 'Selected Poems', 1929
* 'John Deth, A Metaphysical Legacy, and Other Poems', 1930
* 'The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones', 1931
* 'Preludes for Memnon', 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', 1944
* 'The Kid', 1947
* 'The Divine Pilgrim', 1949
* 'Skylight One: Fifteen Poems', 1949
* 'Collected Poems', 1953
* 'A Letter from Li Po and Other Poems', 1955
* 'Sheepfold Hill: Fifteen Poems', 1958
* 'The Morning Song of Lord Zero, Poems Old and New', 1963
* 'Thee: A Poem', 1967
* 'Collected Poems', 2nd ed., 1970

Short story collections
=========================
* 'Bring! Bring! and Other Stories' (1925)
* 'Costumes by Eros' (1928)
* 'Among the Lost People' (1934)
* 'The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken' (1950)
* 'The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken' (1960)

Novels
========
* 'Blue Voyage' (1927)
* 'Great Circle' (1933)
* 'King Coffin' (1935)
* 'A Heart for the Gods of Mexico' (1939)
* 'The Conversation' (1940)

Other books
=============
* 'Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry' (1919)
* 'Ushant' (1952)
* 'A Reviewer's ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken from 1916 to
the Present' (1958)

Short stories
===============
Title !! Publication !! Collected in
"The Timid Burglar" 'The Story Teller' 14 (January 1903) -
"The Making of the Trail" 'The Anvil' (January 1904) -
"My Lord's Pirate" 'The Anvil' (June 1904) -
"The Dreamer" 'The Anvil' (November 1904) -
"Number 58" 'The Anvil' (January 1905) -
"How the Partnership Was Dissolved" 'The Anvil' (March 1905) -
"The Fiddlers Three" 'The Anvil' (November 1905) -
"Rabbit" 'The Harvard Advocate' (November 25, 1908) -
"The Wallet" 'The Harvard Advocate' (December 18, 1908) -
"The Cat and the Mouse" 'The Harvard Advocate' (January 26, 1909)
-
"The Murderer" 'The Harvard Advocate' (April 28, 1909) -
"By the Hermitage Walls" 'The Harvard Advocate' (October 26, 1909)
-
"Me and Her" (with W.C. Greene) 'The Harvard Advocate' (November
20, 1909) -
"Corpus Vile" 'The Harvard Advocate' (December 20, 1909) -
"The Huntsman" 'The Harvard Advocate' (February 11, 1910) -
"College Kodaks" 'The Harvard Advocate' (March 4, 1910) -
"The Dark City" 'The Dial' (April 1922) rowspan=4| 'Bring! Bring!
and Other Stories'
"Soliloquy on a Park Bench" 'The Dial' (June 1922)
"The Escape from Fatuity" 'The Milwaukee Arts Monthly'
(November-December 1922)
"Smith and Jones" 'The Dial' (April 1923)
"White Crinolines" 'Munsey's Magazine' (June 1923) -
"The Disciple" 'Harper's Magazine' (December 1924) rowspan=9|
'Bring! Bring! and Other Stories'
"Strange Moonlight" 'The Dial' (March 1925)
"The Last Visit" 'The Dial' (April 1925)
"The Letter" rowspan=6| 'Bring! Bring! and Other Stories' (March
1925)
"Bring! Bring!"
"Hey, Taxi!"
"The Anniversary"
"By My Troth, Nerisa!"
"The Orange Moth"
"State of Mind" 'The New Republic' (July 6, 1927) rowspan=14|
'Costumes by Eros'
"The Necktie" 'Bermondsey Book' (September-November 1927)
"Your Obituary, Well Written" 'Scribner's Magazine' (November 1927)
"Spider, Spider" 'Scribner's Magazine' (February 1928)
"The Woman-Hater" 'Scribner's Magazine' (April 1928)
"The Moment" 'Harper's Magazine' (May 1928)
"All, All Wasted" 'The Harvard Advocate' (May 1928)
"Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!" 'Scribner's Magazine' (August 1928)
"Field of Flowers" rowspan=6| 'Costumes by Eros' (September 1928)
"I Love You Very Dearly"
"A Man Alone at Lunch"
"A Conversation"
"The Professor's Escape"
"West End"
"The Fish Supper" 'Scribner's Magazine' (December 1928)
rowspan=12| 'Among the Lost People'
"No, No, Go Not to Lethe" 'Scribner's Magazine' (August 1929)
"Gehenna" 'Gehenna' (1930)
"Mr. Arcularis" 'Harper's Magazine' (March 1931)
"Bow Down, Isaac!" 'Harper's Magazine' (July 1931)
"Silent Snow, Secret Snow" 'Virginia Quarterly Review' (October
1932)
"Impulse" 'Story' (April 1933)
"O How She Laughed!" rowspan=5| 'Among the Lost People' (March
1934)
"The Night Before Prohibition"
"Pure as the Driven Snow"
"The Bachelor Supper"
"Thistledown"
"Life Isn't a Short Story" 'North American Review' (June 1934)
'The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken'
"Fly Away Ladybird" 'Esquire' (November 1934) 'The Collected
Short Stories of Conrad Aiken'
"Round By Round" 'The American Mercury' (April 1935) rowspan=3|
'The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken'
"A Pair of Vikings" 'Esquire' (March 1941)
"Hello, Tib" 'Mademoiselle' (May 1941)

External links
======================================================================
*
*
*
*[http://www.blackcatpoems.com/a/conrad_aiken.html Poems by Conrad
Aiken] An extensive collection of Aiken's poetry
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20060929032831/http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/aiken.html
Conrad Aiken: Unitarian Prodigy Poet] Biography
*
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20110930074056/http://www.geckotales.com/bonaventure_cemetery.htm
Conrad Aiken's Grave in Savannah, Georgia]
*[http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-454&sug=y
New Georgia Encyclopedia entry]
*[http://theotherpages.org/poems/poem-ab.html#aiken Index entry for
Conrad Aiken at Poets' Corner]
*[http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/conrad_aiken/biography Famous
Poets and Poems, Aiken Biography]
*[http://www.bookrags.com/biography/conrad-aiken/ Bookrags.com]
*[http://www.libs.uga.edu/gawriters/aiken.html Libs.uga.edu]
*[http://nbapoetryblog.squarespace.com/journal/2011/2/18/1954.html
Collected Poems by Conrad Aiken on the National Book Awards Poetry
Blog]
*
*[http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.Hough:hou01346 Guides to Conrad
Aiken's prose], [http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.Hough:hou01345
poetry], and [http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.Hough:hou01347
correspondence] at
[https://web.archive.org/web/20111121125844/http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/
Houghton Library], Harvard University
*
*[http://georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu/topics/historical_markers/county/chatham/conrad-aiken
Conrad Aiken] historical marker
*[http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8xx26 Conrad Aiken] at the Stuart A.
Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library

License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Aiken