Conrad Aiken

Now it would be possible to elaborate indefinitely on these statements and to trace this general tendency in innumerable directions. But as there are many such horizontal studies of the contemporary scene, it may be illuminating for a change to consider as symptom and symbol, the work of one author who is peculiarly typical of the age, who is neither desirous nor capable of escaping from it, who is greatly endowed yet not forced to a self-conscious consistency by too much public adulation, who is a Proteus in character but also a highly sensitive individual. Such a figure is Conrad Aiken, one of the least appreciated but one of the most interesting and representative writers of the past fifteen years.

He is the psychological poet par excellence, the incisive critic of his contemporaries, the author of a beautiful and subtle novel, Blue Voyage. He is an incorrigible victim of modernity and exemplifies in literature all those qualities so bitterly condemned by our humanist and neoclassic critics. He traffics with the unconscious, bows before "the Great God Flux," exploits personal experiences directly and shamelessly, cultivates the blur and tries to convert poetry into a kind of absolute music. In short, a radical, confused, sentimental and bitter romanticist.

Now it would be easy to explain Conrad Aiken's work as a product of post-war disillusion, easy but utterly false, as chronology alone will indicate. He took no part in the war and saw through the camouflage of the period. He wrote three of his chief poems, The Charnel Rose, The Jig of Forslin and The House of Dust, between 1915 and 1917, and his psychological studies were started even earlier. We are also apt to forget that Eliot Poems are dated 1909- 1925, and that such characteristic pieces as the Preludes and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock were among his earliest. Far too much is blamed on the war. Far too often it is used as a blanket explanation of the most diverse achievements. It may have colored and accelerated somewhat the melancholy forces that we see in operation, but it did not originate them.

Conrad Aiken has taken modern psychology seriously and immersed himself in its lore, with a poet's privileges. Some of his closest friends have been psychiatrists and he often wishes he had become one himself. An extreme introvert with a critical turn that is brutally objective, he is well qualified to understand cases of morbid repression, multiple personality and the whole literature of spiritual ambiguity. He has deliberately made this strange material the subject of his work, and may be considered the initiator of those long analytic poems which are among the most characteristic modes of contemporary verse.

Conrad Aiken has always been adept in what is now rather solemnly called "psychological criticism" and does not hesitate to adulterate his pure aesthetic judgments with biographical and clinical material. He early pointed out that the poet who is also a critic (as so many are today) is inevitably engaged in defending his own brand of poetry and that his criticism would be "as it were, a slow distillation of his temperament through his reason." Devoted though he is to poetry, Aiken is not sentimental or solemn about "eternal art," which he considers, prosaically, a biological, compensatory function; as he also realizes that his own particular kind of work may be simply the expression of a pronounced neurosis. This somewhat untraditional, if not cynical, approach to the whole field of poetry has allowed him to cut through many time-honored illusions, at the same time that it compels him to reveal frankly his own prejudices.

No writer today exhibits more fully than Conrad Aiken the symptoms of mania psychologica. No one has been more eager to make confusion worse confounded. Consequently we should find that his work is not only interesting and important in itself, but that it is excellent litmus paper for tracing "the acids of modernity." We should find that his vision of chaos is made both more piquant and more tolerable by his incorrigible melodiousness.