• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received Mic 60-4113 MARTIN, Jay Herbert. CONRAD AIKEN: A LIFE OF HIS ART. The Ohio State University, P h .D ., 1960 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Copyright by Jay Herbert Martin CONRAD AIKEN A LIFE OF HIS ART DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By JAY HERBERT MARTIN, A. B., M. A. ******* The Ohio State University 1960 Approved by , Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My warmest thanks are due to Conrad Aiken not only for his kind permission to quote from works copyrighted by him, but also for his encouragement of this study. I especially want to express my grati­ tude to my adviser, Professor Roy Harvey Pearce, for his generous advice and assistance. I am further indebted for helpful suggestions and inform ation to P ro fe sso r Howard Babb and P ro fesso r John Harold W ilson. ii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ I ONE: WORK IN PROGRESS..............................................................13 TWO: THE USES OF THE F IC T IO N ........................................... 51 THREE: THE WORD, THE WORLD, THE WOUND...................... 109 FOUR: CARITAS.............................................................................. 155 FIVE: AND CULTURE: THE POET AS S A G E ...................... 198 TABLE OF ABBREVIATIONS U S E D ..............................................264 CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF BOOKS BY CONRAD AIKEN . 265 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS ON CONRAD A IK E N ......................268 AUTOBIOGRAPHY ............................................................. ...277 INTRODUCTION Conrad Aiken has been one of the most prolific of modem American writers. Since 1914 when his first book appeared, he has published not only the twenty-five volumes of poetry for which he is best known, but also five novels, four short story collections, a play, and two books of criticism. His first volume of verse coincided with the beginning of the poetry renaissance in America; Sheepfold Hill, his latest book of poems, appeared in 1958. During this forty-four year interval no more than three years separate the appearance of Aiken’s successive books. For these reasons, his literary career might be studied in several fruitful and interesting ways. The most obvious way to deal with Aiken is to use his work as the center of a study in the dynamics of literary reputations in the twentieth century. For it would not be unfair to say that of our major poets Aiken has received the least critical attention. It is not surprising, then, that much of the appreciative criticism written on Aiken during the last thirty years has focused on this point. Houston Peterson’s Melody of Chaos was written to defend Aiken's reputation against the claims of others. It is a curious irony of literary history that Aiken should have been the first writer of his generation to serve as the subject of a full-length study; The Melody of Chaos preceded by four years F. 0. Matthiessen's work on Eliot. 1 2 Successive critics since Peterson have complained about the inatten­ tion Aiken has received. In 1937 R. P. Blackmur wrote: An important. fact about Mr. Aiken is the almost complete absence of serious attention, whether from readers or critics, with which his later poetry has been received. .. The critics have been indifferent, ignorant, inattentive, preoccupied, and have dealt out kindly, and therefore irrelevant, praise for old time's sake. Many reviews have had about them that air of unconscious and mannerly illusion that flourishes in the records of class reunions. I cannot think of a more sickening consensus of unfounded opinion and hardly of a more revolting example of good will than the kindliness of inattention. The only explanation I can think of, and it is no excuse, is that most of Mr. A ik en 's poems in recen t years have been c a lle d "Preludes" and have been numbered without other title, and th ere have been a g re a t many of them, and th a t most of them have appeared in blank verse. Further than that I can only b eliev e th a t th e poems have been m erely scanned and never read--and, the reviewers have come away, like the presumed reader, with the labor-saving notion that here was more of the same, the same old Aiken, o ld er but no different. ...-*• In 1943, Delraore Schwartz complained, in similar fashion, that "each time a new volume of verse has appeared, the same cliches of misunder­ standing have been brought forward, in new d ress, o r in the same o old dress, if the reviewer is tired." Nearly ten years later, Malcolm Lowry commented upon the same f a ilu r e of the c r i t i c s . He added, however, the distinction that Aiken's contemporaries—for instance, Eliot, Joyce, and Marianne Moore—have all shown considerable admira­ 1. "Mr. Aiken's Second Wind," N. Re£., LXXXIX (Jan. 13, 1937), 335. 2. "Merry-go-Round of Opinion," N. Rep., CVIII (Mar. 1, 1943), 292. f tion for his work, and only "the odd reviewer. would give the impression now and then that a certain work was outdated or insignifi­ cant or showed 'traces1 of something or other: this opinion someone else would repeat almost verbatim in a given review...."^ Samuel French Morse has recently, and with considerable vehemence, continued this complaint, commenting that "no other contemporary poet of equal stature has suffered such politely cavalier treatment, and none has been so respectfully ignored." While poets like William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens had undergone reappraisal during the 'fifties, Morse noted that in the case of Aiken's work, "there is evidence that the limitations noted by so many of his critics have been gleaned at second hand (even to the point of compounding some errors of fact) rather than freshly discovered as the result of a fresh reading."^ Aiken has always insisted that the w riter's only concern must be with his actual writing, not with his reputation; consequently, he has seldom complained publicly about his critical treatment. In reaction to reviews by Louise Bogan and Randall Jarrell of his 1940 volume And in The Human Heart, however, Aiken wrote to Malcolm Cowley of the \ curious course of his literary reputation: A nother in te re s tin g comment is to the e f fe c t th a t only recently have my books been badly treated--tacit assumption 3. "A Letter," Wake U , 1952, p. 82. 4. "A Word in Praise," Poetry, LXIX (June, 1956), 179. 4 being that my earlier ones weren't. That line might be described as the theme song of my literary career. Each new book is panned--but in the background is the implica­ tion that all the previous ones were good. In me you behold an almost unique phenomenon, a poet who has acquired a Reputation, or a Position, or what have you, without ever having been caught in the act--as it were, by a process of osmosis. At any given moment in the Pegasus Sweepstakes, in whatever Selling Plate or for whatever year, this dubious horse has always been the last in the list of the a ls o -ra n ,--h e has never even placed, much le s s won, nor I regret to report, have the offers to put him out to stud been either remunerative or very attractive.^ An investigation of the factors in literary reputation, with Aiken as its point of reference, might certainly prove very inter­ esting. Such a study might adduce several reasons for the critical neglect of Aiken's work. Because Aiken produced such a mass of ostensibly similar work between 1916 and 1920 he became identified with a certain style—the mellifluous, honeyed perfection of "Discordants" and the blue-flower romanticism and Kraft-Ebing decadent eroticism of The Charnel Rose. Thus, his later, quite different, poetry has been judged very often in the light of the reputation his earliest work gained him. Such is the case, for instance, in Vernon L oggins1 I Hear America. By 1937, when th is book was published, Aiken had written his two volumes of Preludes, Landscape West of Eden, and Osiris Jones. Yet, despite this growth, the poem by which Loggins judges him is the 1916 Jig of Forslin, Aiken's third volume. Aiken has suffered comparable treatment in Louis Untermeyer's forty-year 5. Quoted by Malcolm Cowley in "Biography With Letters," Wake 11, p . 30. 5 series of anthologies of American Poetry. Both in his prefaces and in his selections, Untermeyer has always represented Aiken by his earliest work--and Untermeyer's. influence upon the formulation of a hierarchy in poetry has been immense. In short, because Aiken achieved a poetic "character" so early, his reputation has ultimately suffered. In his review of the Preludes for Memnon, Granville Hicks argued: "So much has been w ritte n about Conrad A ik e n ... th a t i t should be necessary merely to summarize c r itic a l opinion of his £ previous work," in order to judge any new book. Other critics, perhaps in the main unconsciously, have proceeded in a similar fashion. Such a method allows no p o s s ib ility for progress, and ir o n ic a lly , as I shall show, Conrad Aiken's work can only be adequately evaluated with regard to its development. His poems are always (as Valery and Peguy considered their poems) "Work in Progress," in which not the achievement but the growth is all-important.

Load more

  282

Copy Link