Classic Poetry Series Conrad Potter Aiken - poems - Publication Date: 2012 Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive Conrad Potter Aiken(5 August 1889 – 17 August 1973) Conrad Potter Aiken was an American novelist and poet, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play and an autobiography. <b>Early Years</b> Aiken was the son of wealthy, socially prominent New Englanders who had moved to Savannah, Georgia, where his father became a highly respected physician and surgeon. But then something happened for which, as Aiken later said, no one could ever find a reason. Without warning or apparent cause, his father became increasingly irascible, unpredictable, and violent. Then, early in the morning of February 27, 1901, he murdered his wife and shot himself. According to his own writings, Aiken (who was eleven years old) heard the gunshots and discovered the bodies. He was raised by his aunt in Massachusetts. Aiken was educated at private schools and at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, then at Harvard University where he edited the Advocate with <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/thomas-stearns-eliot/">T.S. Eliot</a> who became a lifelong friend and associate. Aiken's earliest poetry was written partly under the influence of a beloved teacher, the philosopher <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/george- santayana/">George Santayana</a> This relation shaped Aiken as a poet who was deeply musical in his approach and, at the same time, philosophical in seeking answers to his own problems and the problems of the modern world. <b>Adult Years</b> Aiken was deeply 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 psychological themes. He wrote the widely anthologized short story Silent Snow, Secret Snow (1934). His collections of verse include Earth Triumphant (1911), 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 and Henry Cowell. 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), criticism, www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 autobiography, and, most important of all, poetry. He was awarded the National Medal for Literature, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the National Book Award. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, taught briefly at Harvard, and served as Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress from 1950 to 1952. He was also largely responsible for establishing <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/emily-dickinson/">Emily Dickinson's</a> reputation as a major American poet. After 1960, when his work was rediscovered by readers and critics, a new view of Aiken emerged—one that emphasized his psychological problems, along with his continuing study of Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung, and other depth psychologists. Two of his five novels deal with depth psychology. Conrad Aiken's interest in Freud was reciprocated by the great psychoanalyst, who was equally interested in how Aiken used Freudian concepts in his fiction. Freud went so far as to call Aiken's Great Circle one of his favorite novels. At one point Freud expressed interest in meeting Aiken face-to-face to discuss psychoanalysis. Aiken agreed and set off to Europe, but by chance on the boat over met Erich Fromm, a Freud disciple, who convinced Aiken that it would be a bad idea for the writer to have sessions with Freud. Because of this, the two never met. <b>Personal Life</b> Conrad and his family with Jessie McDonald lived in England, where his third child was born, from 1921 to the beginning of World War II. During his time in England, he served in loco parentis as well as mentor to the budding English author Malcolm Lowry. In 1923 he acted as a witness at the marriage of his friend the poet W. H. Davies. In 1950, he became Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, more commonly known as Poet Laureate of the United States. Aiken returned to Savannah for the last 11 years of his life. Aiken's tomb, located in Bonaventure Cemetery on the banks of the Wilmington River, was made famous by its mention in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the bestselling book 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. Its inscriptions read "Give my love to the world," and "Cosmos Mariner—Destination Unknown." He was married three times: first to Jessie McDonald (1912–1929); second to www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2 Clarissa Lorenz (1930) (author of a biography, Lorelei Two); and third to Mary Hoover (1937). He was the father, by Jessie McDonald, of the English writers Jane Aiken Hodge and Joan Aiken. Aiken had three younger siblings, Kempton, Robert and Elizabeth. They were adopted by Frederick Winslow Taylor and his wife Louise, a distant relative, and took Taylor's last name. Kempton was known as K. P. A. Taylor (Kempton Potter Aiken Taylor) and Robert was known as Robert P. A. Taylor (Robert Potter Aiken Taylor). Kempton helped establish the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. The best source for information on Aiken's life is his autobiographical novel Ushant (1952), one of his major works. In this book he speaks 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), <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/ezra-pound/">Ezra Pound</a> (Rabbi Ben Ezra), and other accomplished men. <b>Awards and Recognition</b> Named Poetry Consultant of the Library of Congress from 1950–1952, Conrad Aiken has earned numerous prestigious national writing awards, including a National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal and the National Medal for Literature. Honored by his native state in 1973 with the title of Poet Laureate, Aiken will always be remembered in his native state as the first Georgia-born author to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1930, for his Selected Poems. Aiken was the first winner of the Poetry Society of America (PSA) Shelley Memorial Award in 1929. In 2009, The Library of America selected Aiken’s 1931 story “Mr. Arcularis” for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales. www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 3 A Letter From Li Po Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind announces autumn, and the equinox rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon. Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone, looking for friendship or an old love's sleeve or writing letters to his children, lost, and to his children's children, and to us. What was his light? of lamp or moon or sun? Say that it changed, for better or for worse, sifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk a slant of witch-light; on the pure text a slant of genius; emptying mind and heart for winecups and more winecups and more words. What was his time? Say that it was a change, but constant as a changing thing may be, from chicory's moon-dark blue down the taut scale to chicory's tenderest pink, in a pink field such as imagination dreams of thought. But of the heart beneath the winecup moon the tears that fell beneath the winecup moon for children lost, lost lovers, and lost friends, what can we say but that it never ends? Even for us it never ends, only begins. Yet to spell down the poem on her page, margining her phrases, parsing forth the sevenfold prism of meaning, up the scale from chicory pink to blue, is to assume Li Po himself: as he before assumed the poets and the sages who were his. Like him, we too have eaten of the word: with him are somewhere lost beyond the Gorge: and write, in rain, a letter to lost children, a letter long as time and brief as love. II And yet not love, not only love. Not caritas or only that. Nor the pink chicory love, deep as it may be, even to moon-dark blue, www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 4 in which the dragon of his meaning flew for friends or children lost, or even for the beloved horse, for Li Po's horse: not these, in the self's circle so embraced: too near, too dear, for pure assessment: no, a letter crammed and creviced, crannied full, storied and stored as the ripe honeycomb with other faith than this. As of sole pride and holy loneliness, the intrinsic face worn by the always changing shape between end and beginning, birth and death. How moves that line of daring on the map? Where was it yesterday, or where this morning when thunder struck at seven, and in the bay the meteor made its dive, and shed its wings, and with them one more Icarus? Where struck that lightning-stroke which in your sleep you saw wrinkling across the eyelid? Somewhere else? But somewhere else is always here and now. Each moment crawls that lightning on your eyelid: each moment you must die.