Conrad Aiken - Selected Poems

313 Pages·2004·6.78 MB·English

Selected Poems
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Selected
Poems
with a new Foreword by Harold Bloom
CONRAD AIKEN
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRBSS
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Copyright © 1961, by Conrad Aiken
Copyright renewed © 1989 by Mary Hoover Aiken
Copyright © 2003 by Joan Aiken, Jane Aiken Hodge, and
Joseph Killorin
Foreword copyright © 2003 by Harold Bloom
Copyright © 1918, 1920, 1925, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935,
1936, 1942, 1945, 1947, 1949, 1953, 1955, 1958, 1959, 1960 by
Conrad Aiken
First published in 1961 by Oxford University Press
Reissued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2003
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Gataloging-in-Publication Data
Aiken, Conrad, 1889-1973.
Poems. Selections
Selected poems / Conrad Aiken ; with a new foreword by Harold Bloom.
New York : Oxford University Press, 2003.
p. cm.
PS3501.15A6
0195165462 (acid-free paper)
0195165470 (pbk)
Includes index.
12988976
i. 35798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Foreword by Harold Bloom
The last poem in Conrad Aiken's Collected Poems — Second
Edition (1970) is a vigorous doggerel, "Obituary in Bitcherel."
Aiken died three years later, at eighty-four, but the final couplet
of his self-obituary seems definitive:
Separate we come, separate go.
And this be it known is all that we know.
I write in July-August 2002, having reached my own seventy-
second birthday, and having just read through Aiken's Collected
Poems again. I never fell in love with Aiken's poetry as I did with
Hart Crane's and Wallace Stevens's, but I have been reading it
with pleasure and profit for more than a half-century. Aiken
never was much in fashion, and he seems now to have very few
readers indeed. He was a much more distinguished poet than
such contemporaries as John Peale Bishop and Archibald Mac-
Leish, mere imitators of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Aiken, a
close friend of Eliot and a good acquaintance of Pound, is in-
dependent of them.
Eliot had concealed links to Tennyson and Whitman, while
Pound overtly acknowledged Browning and (more agonistically)
Whitman. Aiken was an overt High Romantic, saluting Keats,
Shelley, Coleridge, Browning, Whitman, and Francis Thomp-
son. He might have added Tennyson and Emerson, since his
Romanticism was eclectic, rather like that of Wallace Stevens.
V
2
Even at his best, in his two sets of "Preludes"—Preludes for
Memnon (1931) and Time in the Rock (1936)—Aiken cannot sus-
tain comparison with Stevens, but who besides Eliot, Frost, and
Hart Crane can? Recalcitrant Romantic as I am, I rank Aiken
with W. C. Williams, Pound, II. D., Marianne Moore, Ransom,
all poets in his generation now much admired and studied. Ai-
ken's flaws are palpable enough: his rhetoric is too consistently
eloquent, and frequently he gives us poetry rather than poems.
And yet it is poetry, cognitive music, free of all ideology, and
courageous in confronting family madness, solitude, death-as-
annihilation, chaos.
With so "musical" a poet as Conrad Aiken, it seems odd to
speak of his "austerity," a quality rightly associated with the Wal-
lace Stevens of the later phase, 1942-1955. There are uncanny
resemblances between Aiken's Preludes and Stevens's Notes To-
ward a Supreme Fiction, but I doubt any influence of Aiken upon
Stevens. The affinity, to a Stevensonian like myself, is deeply
interesting: Preludes for Memnon (or Preludes to Attitude) XXIII-
IV particularly anticipate the Stevens of Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction:
The clouds flow slowly across the sky, the idea
Slowly takes shape, and slowly passes, and changes
Its shape in passing, it is a shape of grief,
Plangent and poignant It is a comic gesture.
It is a wound in air. It is last year.
It is the notion, — flippantly held and lost,—
Of next year, with a burden of coarse disasters.
Or the year after, with a burden of boredom.
The leaf has come and gone — it was hard, bright, brittle,
Bare thorns, sparkled in light, and now is lost,—
* * «
And so you poise yourself, magnificent angel,—
Bird of bright dream, brief soul of briefer knowledge,—
In the pure asther of a thought, unthinking
Of endings or beginnings. And the light
Of change and unknown purpose hues your wings.
The cloud, that hangs between you and the moon,
Darkening all things, darkens also you.
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The sunrise burns you to an incandescence.
And sleep, annihilator of the all and nothing,
Makes of your wings a demon's wings, that winnow
The freezing airs of chaos.
* * >*
Upward he soars from nothing, and his wings
Are marvelous with dew; or downward plunges
To that sublime Gehenna whence we came.
There too his wings are wide; and there he hangs,
Magnificent, in madness and corruption,
Master of outrage, and at home in shame.
Perhaps Stevens, on some level, recalled this in the magnif-
icent flight of the Canon Aspirin's Angel in Notes, yet the ana-
logue transcends any possibility of influence: Aiken and Stevens
are Lucretian poets, allied by a cosmic nihilism and an Epicu-
rean refusal to mourn. They both exemplify the American Sub-
lime, a secular transcendence in the wake of Emerson, Whit-
man, Dickinson, and both of them subtly satirized T.S. Eliot's
New Christianity, as here in Section LXI of Preludes for Mem-
non, that slyly parodies Ash Wednesday, published just a year
before:
Shall we, then, play the sentimental stop,
And flute the soft nostalgic note, and pray
Dead men and women to remember us,
Imaginary gods to pity us?
Saying
We are unworthy, father, to be remembered,
We are unworthy to be remembered, mother,
Remember us, O clods from whom we come —
The Preludes invoke Blake and Shelley, implicitly against El-
iot. Aiken knew his own tradition of High Romanticism, and
deserves to take his place with W. B. Yeats, Stevens, D. H.
Lawrence, and Hart Crane as a late carrier of that central poetic
mode. This new edition of Selected Poems is the right way to
begin with Aiken, whose total body of poetry is rather daunting.
vii
3
After the Preludes, the new reader of Aiken will seek out, for
herself or himself, her or his own favorites in this volume. My
own include some that once were anthology-pieces, and some
others always neglected. I begin with those I possess by memory:
Senlin: A Biography, II, 2, his "Morning Song"; "And in the
Hanging Gardens," "Sea Holly," and many from the Preludes.
But there is also the extraordinary, twenty-five page visionary
poem, Landscape West of Eden, which is one of Aiken's master-
works. So are The Kid and "Mayflower," rekincllings of early
American history. The elegy, "Another Lycidas," and "The Crys-
tal," the summa of a poetic career, serve together as something
close to a concentration of all of Aiken into two inevitable
works. Here Aiken refinds himself in Pythagoras, imaginative
brother:
It would be for this
Apollonian fountain of the forever enfolding,
the forever-together, ourselves but a leaf
on the fountain of tree, that we would return:
the crystal self-shaping, the godhead designing the god.
For this moment of vision, we would return.
How shall we hold the eclectic Conrad Aiken together, so
that we can see him clearly in the idea of his crystal? His best
clue (to me) comes at the end of Section XLII of Time in the
Rock:
who would carve words must carve himself,
first carve himself; and then alas
finds, too late, that Word is only Hand.
There is no Eliotic "incarnate word"; there is only the hand
of the artist. The idea necessarily is shared with the geniuses of
Modernism, Joyce and Proust, Matisse and Picasso. Aiken's au-
tobiographical essay, Ushant (1952), is written in the shadow of
Joyce's Ulysses, as is Blue Voyage, perhaps the best of Aiken's
novels. And it is Joyce, not Eliot, or Pound, who is the fecund,
major influence upon Aiken's poetry.
viii
4
Aiken's diction tends not to be original, a weakness that he
transformed into a relative strength. Whether he quite sur-
mounted his overt reliance upon traditional modes of figuration,
I sadly doubt. There he contrasts unfavorably with Hart Crane,
as with Stevens and Eliot. The problem (or part of it) ensued
from Aiken's hard-thought conviction that he could best extend
his reader's "general awareness" by playing upon, rather than
against, traditional associations. Associative rhetoric became Ai-
ken's prime resource, and reflected Freud's lasting influence
upon him. And yet Aiken truly had an American Gothic sensi-
bility, echoing Hawthorne's and Poe's, and that kind of sensibility
drowns in associative language. Such gorgeous failures as the
"symphony", The Chamel Rose, and John Deth: A Metaphysical
Legend testify to this miasma in Aiken.
The true questions for me, are why and how Aiken makes it
work as often as he does, since he does not want to (and cannot)
make it new. On the surface, Robert Frost is rarely innovative,
but that is illusive: Frost is cunning, and radically original. The
ironies of Frost's best poems are largest where they are least ev-
ident. Aiken rarely implies the opposite of what he says, and the
reader schooled by Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Hart Crane can come
to feel that Aiken does not know where to curtail or qualify his
continuous assertions.
And yet eloquence, in Conrad Aiken, can take on the Amer-
ican Romantic force that Emerson prophesied and Whitman ex-
emplified. There is a fire in Aiken's best poetry so idiosyncratic
that I want to call it the refiner's fire, alchemical and breaking
out beyond all limits. Section XIV of the Preludes for Memnon
shares in the mythmaking audacity of Shelley and Blake, though
it has more in common with Victor Hugo in the sublime mad-
ness of his long cosmological poems, God and The End of Satan.
—What did you see?
--I saw myself and God.
I saw the ruin in which godhead lives:
Shapeless and vast: the strewn wreck of the world:
Sadness unplurnbed: miser)' without bound.
Wailing I heard, but also I heard joy,
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