Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) was an American author. His works include The House of Dust: A Symphony (1920), Selected Poems (1929), Conversation (or Pilgrim's Progress) (1940), The Soldier (1944), The Kid (1947), and UShant: An Essay (1952). He won a Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems.

Life and Works

Conrad Aiken Potter was born on August 5, 1889, in Savannah, Georgia, to a New York doctor father and a Unitarian minister mother, but his father killed his mother and himself when Aiken was 11. This was greatly psychologically disturbing to him, and one of his chief influences along with his Harvard philosophy professor, George Santayana. He attended Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1912, along with T.S. Eliot.

He contributed to Dial magazine, where he met Ezra Pound, and published his first volume, Earth Poetry, in 1914, establishing him as a poet, which he cited as an excuse to avoid the World War One draft. He continued to work as a poet before World War Two, marrying three times, crossing the Atlantic many times, publishing essays in Scepticisms (1919), and winning the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems. He was greatly influences in this time by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and many of his novels, such as The Great Circle (1933), involve characters in need of psychoanalysis. He was likely better known for his short stories than his poems in the style of music. While much of them, especially "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," include characters that are parallel to Aiken's psyche, he only published a complete replica of himself in his autobiography, UShant. He died August 17, 1973, in Savannah, Georgia.

External links

• Poems at the Black Cat Poetry website
• Poems at the Poem hunter website
• Extensive Biography by the Poetry Foundation