This blog is more information about Conrad Aiken, second poet chosen, in my second poets tribute series.. - Robert Lindley's Blog

(1.)
https://www.poetry-archive.com/a/aiken_conrad.html

POEMS BY CONRAD AIKEN:
Chance Meetings
The Dance of Life
Discordants
Evensong
Miracles
Morning Song of Senlin
Red is the Color of Blood
Zudora
RELATED WEBSITES
Poems by Conrad Aiken - An extensive collection of his poetry.
Conrad Aiken: Poetry - More poems by Conrad Aiken.
Conrad Aiken: Bibliography - A bibliography of Aiken's poetic, prose, and dramatic works; includes a list of critical resources.
Read a Conrad Aiken interview
Learn more about Conrad Aiken
Purchase books by Conrad Aiken

(2.)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/conrad-aiken

Conrad Aiken
1889–1973
Conrad Aiken
Although he received the most prestigious of literary awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for Selected Poems and a National Book Award in 1954 for Collected Poems, 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. This fact puzzled his admirers and, indeed, Aiken himself, who never lost his self-confidence and who always denied the charge that his poetry might be too difficult. Benjamin DeMott considered possibilities for Aiken's lack of exposure in a Saturday Review article: "The reasons for the neglect aren't so far to seek as might be supposed. They have to do partly with this poet's reluctance to break with certain nineteenth-century conventions of sound and posture. . . . Aiken has often flown against [dominant taste], writing heavy music, laying out gorgeous sound, providing no clear 'speaker,' no definable 'dramatic situation,' and pruning no modifiers." According to Alden Whitman of the New York Times, Louis Untermeyer once commented that "the poet made no effort to popularize himself or make himself in fashion." Aiken noted one curious phenomenon about his critical reception. He wrote to Malcolm Cowley that "each new book is panned—but in the background is the implication that all the previous ones were good."

A childhood tragedy left an indelible impression on Aiken. When he was eleven, his father shot first 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." It has been suggested that much of Aiken's interest in psychology stemmed from that shattering incident. Aiken once said that his short story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" (a psychological portrait of a disturbed boy) was "a projection of my own inclination to insanity." 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. Jennifer Aldrich noted in the Sewanee Review: "Three of Aiken's five novels, many of his short stories, and his first long poetic series, The Divine Pilgrim, as well as some of the later poems, were all written in the physical form of a journey. The actual vehicles of these journeys seem . . . to be in some way a symbol for consciousness; and the goal is the self." Throughout his career, Aiken measured his characters' progress along the voyage with a Freudian yardstick. Psychological themes were sometimes explored in unconventional formal structures. In a preface to his Three Novels: Blue Voyage, Great Circle, King Coffin, Aiken commented: " Great Circle, written five years after Blue Voyage, is just as insistently psychological in its approach to its theme, but less closely tethered to my own personality than its predecessor. . . . My early and continued preoccupation with musical form was allowed greater play."

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 Romanticists. In one case, an admired writer's style was baldly reproduced in Aiken's work. Alden Whitman reported in the New York Times that in his maturity Aiken called his first book of verse, Earth Triumphant, and Other Tales in Verse,"a dead steal from [John] Masefield." Aiken was aware that critics considered his style imitative, and at times he responded humorously to such suggestions. 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." Aiken discussed the issue of influence more seriously with Robert Hunter Wilbur in a Paris Review interview. 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."

A Harvard acquaintance to whom Aiken gave great credit was a professor of his, George Santayana. In the Paris Review interview, Aiken asserted that it was Santayana who 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. According to Jennifer Aldrich in the Sewanee Review, when Aiken was "invited to give his notions of what poetry should be" he turned to the following passage from Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets: "Focus a little experience, give some scope and depth to your feeling, and it grows imaginative; give it more scope and more depth, focus all experience within it, make it a philosopher's vision of the world, and it will grow more imaginative in a superlative degree, and be supremely poetical. . . . Poetry, then, is not poetical for being short-winded or incidental, but on the contrary, for being comprehensive and having range. If too much matter renders it heavy, that is the fault of the poet's weak intellect, not of the outstretched world."

Aiken produced much of his most important work in the 1920s and early 1930s, 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 of Samuel Jeake, Jr. as London correspondent for the New Yorker. Following his divorce in 1939 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.

While 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 Briet in 1950, he 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. 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." In Whitman's opinion, Aiken ha.....
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(3.)
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/conrad_aiken