Conrad Aiken – Biography of Conrad Aiken

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Conrad Potter Aiken was born on August 5, 1889, in Savannah, Georgia, USA The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, writer, novelist, and critic, whose works, influenced by early psychoanalytic theory, were largely concerned with the human need for the Self-awareness and a sense of identity, he faced considerable trauma in his childhood when he found the bodies of his parents, after his father murdered his mother and committed suicide. He later wrote this experience in his autobiography Ushant (1952).

Aiken He was educated in private schools and at Harvard University, where he was a friend and contemporary of TS Eliot (whose poetry was to influence his). An English professor at Harvard in the late 1920s and a London correspondent for The New Yorker in the mid-1930s, he divided his life almost evenly between England and the United States until 1947, when he settled in Massachusetts. Aiken contributed decisively as editor of Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924) by establishing the posthumous reputation of the poet, and played a significant role in introducing the work of American poets to the British public.

After the first three collections of verses, Aiken he wrote five “symphonies” between 1915 and 1920 in an effort to create poetry that resembled music, in its ability to express various levels of meaning simultaneously. Then came a period of narrative poems, several volumes of poetry and meditations, and, after World War II, a return to the musical form but with deeper philosophical and psychological overtones. The best of his poetry is in Selected Poems (1929), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1930, and Collected Poems (1953), including a long sequence “Preludes to the definition“, which some critics consider his masterpiece. Aiken He served as a poetry consultant for the Library of Congress from 1950 to 1952.

Most of the fiction of Aiken it was written in the twenties and thirties. Usually from this period, more than his novels are considered successful his short stories, in particular, “Strange Moonlight” from Bring! Bring! (1925) and “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” Y “Mr. Arcularis” from Among the lost people (1934). In 1950 it was published The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, followed by A Reviewer’s ABC: Collected Criticism from 1916 to the Present (1958) and The Collected Novels (1964). Despite the many awards received by, many critics have concluded that Aiken never received adequate recognition for his work.

Conrad Aiken He passed away on August 17, 1973 in his hometown of Savannah (Georgia).