Conrad (Potter) Aiken was born at Savannah, Georgia, August 5, 1889. He attended Harvard, receiving his A.B. in 1912, travelled extensively for three years, and since then, he has devoted all his time to literature, living at South Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

The most outstanding feature of Aiken’s creative work is its rapid adaptability and its slow growth. His first volume, Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse (1914), is the Keats tradition crossed, paraphrased (and vulgarized) by Masefield. Turns and Movies (1916) is a complete change; Masefield is exchanged for Masters. But in the less conspicuous half of this book, Aiken begins to speak with his true voice. Here he is the natural musician, playing with new rhythms, haunting cadences. The Jig of Forslin (1916) is an elaboration of his method. In this volume, Aiken goes back to the narrative—or rather, to a series of loosely connected stories—and, reinforced by studies in analytical psychology, explores “the process of vicarious wish fulfilment by which civilized man enriches his circumscribed life.”

Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917), The Charnel Rose (1918) and The House of Dust (1920) are packed with a tired but often beautiful music. Even though much of it is enlivened by injections of T. S. Eliot’s conversational idiom, the effect is often moony and monotonous. Rain seems to fall persistently through these volumes; dust blows down the street, the shadows blur; everything dissolves in a mist of boredom and forgetfulness. Even the poignance seems on the point of falling asleep.

Often Aiken loses himself in this watery welter of language. In trying to create a closer liaison between poetry and music, he gives, too frequently, so much importance to the rise and fall of syllables that his very excess of music defeats his purpose. His verse, thus, gains greatly on the sensuous side but loses, in its cloying indefiniteness, that vitality and sharpness of speech which is the very blood of poetry.

This weakening overinsistence on sound does not prevent Aiken from attaining many exquisite effects. Primarily, a lyric poet, he frequently condenses an emotion in a few lines; some of his best moments are these “lapses” into tune. The music of the Morning Song from “Senlin” (in The Charnel Rose) is rich with subtleties of rhythm. But it is much more than a lyrical movement. Beneath the flow and flexibility of these lines, there is a delightful whimsicality, an extraordinary summoning of the immensities that loom behind the casual moments of everyday. And in “The Fulfilled Dream,” Aiken can divert the stream of the subconscious, whose vague outlines he reproduces so well, to show the dream in its vivid strength.

Besides his varied poetry, Aiken has written a quantity of criticism of contemporary poets, the best of his reviews having been published in Scepticisms (1919), a provocative and valuable series of studies.