“The poet was and is the one who invents language. Which is tantamount…” — Conrad Aiken

“The poet was and is the one who invents language. Which is tantamount to inventing experience, or awareness.”

Presenting poetic language as a means of enlarging human perception · Letter to John Gould Fletcher

About Conrad Aiken

5 August 1889–17 August 1973

The story of Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 – August 17, 1973) reads like something from a Gothic novel, yet it is the true foundation upon which one of twentieth-century America's most psychologically complex poets built his life and work. Born into comfortable circumstances in Savannah, Georgia, Aiken seemed…

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“It is in a kind of redundancy, on the psychic plane, that an artist's character is most manifest.”

Suggesting that an artist is revealed most clearly by recurring inner excesses · Essay, Possessor and Possessed: John Gould Fletcher, Scepticisms (1919)

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“Can one safely prophesy about any poet? It is doubtful.”

Warning against confident predictions about an artist's future development · Essay, The Higher Vaudeville: Vachel Lindsay, Scepticisms (1919)

“To give the lowdown on himself, and through himself on humanity.”

Defining the poet's task as candid self-examination that reveals something universal · Letter, quoted by Malcolm Cowley

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About Conrad Aiken

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