| Conrad Potter Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia of English parents. His father was a surgeon whose influence upon his son is often manifest in his poetry. Get this, early in his life, his father murdered his mother and then commited suicide. After this happened, he went to Massachusetts to live with his relatives. He went to Middlesex School and graduated with the famous Harvard Class of 1911 (T. S. Eliot, Van Wyck Brooks, Heywood Broun, Walter Lippmann, to name some of the fellow graduates). While at Harvard, he wrote for the Harvard Monthly and the Advocate, and was class poet. He married Jessie MacDonald shortly after graduation, settled in Cambridge and chose a career in literature. Two years later, he moved his family to Boston so he could be near his mentor John Gould Fletcher.
Aiken refused to serve in WWI and was the first American artist excused from combat to follow his craft. He first worked as editor to The Dial, 1917-1919 and edited Modern American Poets, 1922 and American Poetry 1671-1928 as well as Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson published in England in 1924. He conducted a school for "informal study in writing and painting" at Rye, England during the 1930's.
His Selected Poems (1929) won the Pulitzer and the Shelley Memorial Award. He recieved a Guggenheim fellowship in 1934 and was honored by the Bryher Award in 1952. His Collected Poems (1953) won the National Book Award. He was Library of Congress Chair of Poetry 1950-1952.
Man, biographical nodes are boring to write.
Principal Works
Poems
- Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse, 1914
- Turns and Movies, 1916
- The Jig of Forslin, 1916
- Nocturne of Remembered Spring, 1917
- The Charnel Rose, 1918
- The House of dust, 1920
- Punch: The Immortal Liar, 1921
- Priapus and the Pool, 1922
- The Pilgrimage of Festus, 1923
- Senlin: A Biography, 1925
- Prelude, 1929
- Selected Poems, 1929
- John Deth and Other Poems, 1930
- The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones, 1931
- Preludes for Memnon, 1931
- Landscape West of Eden, 1933
- Time in the Rock, 1936
- And in the Human Heart, 1940
- Brownstone Eclogues, 1942
- The Kid, 1947
- Skylight One, 1949
- A Letter from Li Po, 1955
- Sheepfold Hill, 1958
- Selected Poems, 1961
Short Stories:
- Bring! Bring!, 1925
- Costumes by Eros, 1928
- Collected Short Stories, 1960
Novels:
- Blue Voyage, 1927
- Great Circle, 1933
- King Coffin, 1935
- Conversation, 1940
- Collected Novels, 1964
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Autobiography:
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