American poet, short story writer, critic and novelist. Most of Conrad Aiken's work reflects his intense interest in psychoanalysis and the development of identity. As editor of Emily Dickinson's Selected Poems (1924) he was largely responsible for establishing that poet's posthumous literary reputation. From the 1920s Aiken divided his life between England and the United States, playing a significant role in introducing American poets to the British audience.

All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that's now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny and by.

Fine ladies all are soon forgotten,
And goldenrod is dust when dead,
The sweetest flesh and flowers are rotten
And cobwebs tent the brightest head.
('All Lovely Things Will Have an Ending,' 1916, in Selected Poems by Conrad Aiken, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929, p. 6)

Conrad Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, the first of four children born to Anna Porter Aiken, the daughter of a Unitarian minister, and William Ford Aiken, a surgeon; Anna was his cousin. In his childhood Aiken experienced a profound trauma when he found on the morning of February 27, 1901, the bodies of his parents – his father, brilliant but unstable, had killed his mother and committed suicide. When reaching the age of his father at the time of the tragedy, Aiken had also difficulties in keeping his depression at bay.

In his "autobiographical narrative" Ushant: An Essay(1952), Aiken wrote that "he had tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless, and apart, and, finding them dead, found himself possessed of them forever." (Ushant: An Essay, London: W. H. Allen, 1963, p. 302) A kind of roman à clef narrated in the third person from the point of view of D., the work contains sketches of Ezra Pound (=Rabbi Ben Ezra), Malcolm Lowry (=Hambo), T.S. Eliot (=Tsetse) and other figures he had met. "And hadn’t dear Hambo himself, and early, avowed his intention of absorbing all he jolly well could of D., in that curious and ambivalent relationship of theirs, as of father and son, on the one hand, and teacher and disciple on the other, absorbing him even to the point of annihilation?" (Ibid., p. 294)

After the funeral, Aiken was brought up his great aunt, Jane Delano Kempton, in New Bedford, and then he came the ward of his aunt Grace Aiken Tillinghats and his uncle, William Hopkins Tillinghas, a Harvard librarian residing in Cambridge. Before entering Harvard Aiken was educated at private schools and at Middlesex School, Concord. In Harvard he shared a class with T.S. Eliot, with whom he edited the Advocate and whose poetry was to influence his own. "They actually came together when Eliot staggered, the worse for drink, out of the Lampoon Club and embraced Aiken." (T.S. Eliot: A Life by Peter Ackroyd, 1984, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984, p. 35) Due to poor class attendance, Aiken was placed on academic probation. Aiken spent in Europe for half a year and eventually graduated in 1912. After receiving the degree of A.B., Aiken married Jessie McDonald, a graduate student from Canada; they had three children.

After working as a reporter, Aiken devoted himself entirely to writing, along with having a small private income. He briefly returned to Harvard as a tutor in 1927. Of the many influences Aiken acknowledged, the writings of Freud, Havelock Ellis, William James, Edgar Allan Poe, and the French Symbolists are evident in his work. Freud considered Aiken's second autobiographical novel, Great Circle (1933), a masterpiece of analytical introspection. Aiken consumed Freud's works.

Earth Triumphant (1914), Aiken's first collection of verse, made him known as a poet. His attempt was to use musical techiques in his poetry. Aiken was a contributing editor to Dial, which led to a friendship with Ezra Pound. Aiken's essays, collected in Skepticisms (1919) and A Reviewer's ABC (1958), dealt with the questions provoked by his commitment to literature as a mode of self-understanding.

During the First World War Aiken claimed that he was in an "essential industry" because of being a poet, and was granted an exemption for this reason. Aiken's adult life was marked by trans-Atlantic journeys. "It is difficult for a writer to mature in America," said Eliot. "This is pity; if Mr Aiken were not so isolated, if he was in contact with European civilisation, he might go so very much farther; his attempt is more impressive than many English successes." ('Reflections on Contemporary Poetry' by T. S. Eliot, The Egoist, July 1919; quoted Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000, edited by Jon Cook, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 105)

In 1921 Aiken moved from Massachusetts to England, settling in Rye, Sussex. At that time Aiken's marriage began to fall apart; they divorced in 1929, and Jessie married the poet's friend Martin Armstrong, a novelist. Clarissa M. Lorenz, a musician and journalist, was Aiken's second wife. They lived at Jeake's House on Mermaid Street – a narrow brick and stone building, one bathroom and eleven rooms. "Conrad favored tweeds but bought few clothes, never wore gloves, carried a stick, seldom went to tea or formal dinner, refused to dance, was a baseball and bullfight fan, and a knockout at croquet, once going through all the wickets in one turn." (Lorelei Two: My Life with Aiken by Clarissa M. Lorenz, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983, p. 4)

Blue Voyage (1927), dedicated to C.M.L. caught the attention of Malcolm Lowry, who tought that it meant himself. He wrote a letter to Aiken, who become his tutor and friend. Together they composed a poem for The Festival Theatre Review protesting the censorship of literature. They both were hard drinkers, shared a Rabelaisian humour, and Lowry, like Aiken, was a lover of cats.

Lowry found it difficult to acknowledge publicly Aiken's great influence on him. Until the publication of Selected Letters (1965), edited by Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry, his importance was not fully realized. In one of the letters he said that Aiken's work "slammed down on my raw psyche like the lightning slamming down on the slew outside at this moment".  (Sursum corda!: The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry: Volume II: 1947-1957, edited with introductions and annotations by Sherrill E. Grace, Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1995, p. 468)

During his stay in Rye, Aiken produced his famous preludes, collected in Preludes for Memnon (1931) and Time in the Rock (1936). There was also a suicide attempt in 1932. He sailed again for Boston in 1933, and then spent two years in Rye (1934-36), writing 'London Letters' to the New Yorker. Preludes for Memnon was dedicated to Aiken's benefactor Henry A. Murray, a Harvard psychologist. A few of Aiken's many letters to Murray were published in Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken (1978).

While in Boston in 1936, Aiken met Mary Augusta Hoover, an artist twenty years his junior; in her he fond the ideal partner for the third phase of his life. After his divorce in 1938 (Clarissa was awarded $500 alimony), Aiken married Mary Hoover in Cuernevaca, Mexico, where jurisdiction was expedient for both quick divorce and marriage. Their trip, made by train with the painter Edward Burra, became the basis of A Heart for the Gods of Mexico (1939), which dealt with a train-ride of three people from Boston to Mexico (Noni, who is dying, Blomberg, Aiken's alter ego, and Gil)  –"landscapes are like states on mind, like feelings, like apprehensions," Aiken wrote. (quoted in Conrad Aiken; A Life of His Art by Jay Martin, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962, p. 141) Most critics ignored the book. Upon the outbreak of World War II, Aiken moved with his wife from Rye to the United States. Mary, who was a painter with a wide range of interests, turned out to be the ideal mate for Aiken's late career as the man of letters.

In 1930 Aiken was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Selected Poems. Most of Aiken's fiction was written between the 1920s and '30s, among others the novels Blue Voyage (1927), in which he used interior monologue, King Coffin (1934), and the short story collections Bring! Bring! (1925), and Among the Lost People (1934), which contains the classic 'Silent Snow, Secret Snow,' a horror story in which the sounds of the falling snow start to haunt a young boy, and 'Mr. Arcularis,' recounting the dream voyage of an aesthete on the operating table, just before discovering his own coffin. "There's a nice little star off to the left, as you round Betelgeuse, which looks as if it might be at the edge The last outpost of the finite." (Ibid., p. 37) The story first appeared in T.S. Eliot's Criterion. Later on Aiken adapted it into a play, published in 1957.

After staying two years in Rye, Aiken settled in 1947 in Brewster, Massachusetts. He was a consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress from 1950 to 1952. In 1953 he published Collected Poems, which included the masterworks 'Preludes to Definition' and 'Morning Song of Senlin'.

And there I saw the seed upon the mountain
but it was not a seed it was a star
but it was not a star it was a world
but it was not a world it was a god
but it was not a god it was a laughter
(Collected Poems, New York: Oxford University Press, 1953, p. 665)

From 1962 on Aiken wintered in a Savannah house adjacent to that of his childhood. Conrad Aiken died in Savannah on August 17, 1973, the year Governor Jimmy Carter named him Poet Laureate of Georgia. His tombstone epitaph in the Bonaventure Cemetery reads: "Cosmos Mariner, Destination Unknown." Posthumously published The Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken (1978) contains correspondence with such literary colleagues as Wallace Stevens, Harriet Monroe, and Edmund Wilson. Besides the Pulitzer Prize, Aiken's many honors and awards include National Book Award (1954), Bollinger Prize in 1956, Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1958, and National Medal for Literature in 1969.

Many of Aiken's friends were leftist, but the author himself could be considered a reactionary par excellence. Provocatively, he insisted that women were mere meat, objects of sexual pleasure, and little more. Malcolm Lowry's wife Jan Gabrial thought that Aiken's political view's were "somewhat to the right of Ghengis Khan." (quoted in Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry by Gordon Bowker,  New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, p. 215)

Aiken was married three times. Two of his daughters from the first marriage became writers: Jane Aiken Hodge (born in 1917), who started to publish popular historical novels and works of romantic suspense from the 1960s, and Joan Aiken. She was born in Sussex in 1924 and educated at home before entering the school at the age of 12. A prolific writer like her sister, Aiken produced more than 30 books for adults and over 60 for children. Her first collection of short stories for children, All You've Ever Wanted, appeared in 1953. Other works include The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), Black Hearts in Battersea (1964), The Silence of Herondale (1964), A Necklace of Raindrops (1968), Midnight is a Place (1974), The Shadow Guests (1980), The Cuckoo Tree (1981), The Way to Write for Children (1982), Mansfield Revisited (1984), Deception (1987), Blackground (1989), Jane Fairfax (1990), Morningquest (1992), Eliza's Daughter (1994), The Winter Sleepwalker (1994), Cold Shoulder Road (1995); The Cockatrice Boys (1996), The Jewel Seed (1997). Joan Aiken's works combine elements from fairy tales, history, horror, supernatural, and adventure.

For further reading: Aiken: A Life of His Art by Jay Martin (1962); From Fiction To Film: Conrad Aiken's Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Gerald R. Barrett & Thomas L. Erskine (1972); Aiken: A Bibliography (1902-1978) by F.W. and F.C. Bonnell (1982); Lorelei Two: My Life with Aiken by Clarissa M. Lorenz (1983); The Writer As Shaman: The Pilgrimages of Conrad Aiken and Walker Percy by Ted R. Spivey (1986); Conrad Aiken by Edward Butsche (1988); Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale by Edward Butscher (1988); The Art of Knowing: The Poetry and Prose of Conrad Aiken by Harry Marten (1988); Conrad Aiken, Our Father by Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge (1989); Aiken: A Priest of Consciousness, edited by Ted R. Spirey and Arthur Waterman (1989); The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken: A Celebration of Consciousness by Catherine Seigel (1993); Time's Stop in Savannah: Conrad Aiken's Inner Journey by Ted Ray Spivey (1997); 'Foreword' by Harold Bloom, in Selected Poems by Conrad Aiken (2003); 'Words and Music Boundaries: Conrad Aiken and his Ambiguous Musicality of Poetry' by Marcin Stawiarski, Comparatismi, Vol. 2 (2017)

Selected works:

• Earth Triumphant, and Other Tales in Verse, 1914
• The Jig of Forslin: A Symphony, 1916
• Turns and Movies and other Tales in Verse, 1916
• Nocturne of Remembered Spring: And Other Poems, 1917
• The Charnel Rose, Senlin: A Biography, and Other Poems, 1918
• Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry, 1919
• The House of Dust: A Symphony, 1920
• Punch: The Immortal Liar, Documents in His History, 1921
• Modern American Poetry, 1922 (selected by Conrad Aiken, rev. 1927., rev. as Twentieth Century American Poetry, 1945, 1963)
• Priapus and the Pool, 1922
• The Pilgrimage of Festus, 1923
• Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1924 (edited by Conrad Aiken)
• Priapus and Other Pool, and Other Poems, 1925
• Bring! Bring! and Other Stories, 1925
• Blue Voyage, 1927
• Poems, 1927
• Costumes by Eros, 1928
• Prelude, 1929
• Selected Poems, 1929 (Pulitzer Prize)
• John Deth, A Metaphysical Legacy, and Other Poems, 1930
• Gehenna, 1930
• The Melody of Chaos , 1931
• The Coming Forth by Day of Oriris Jones, 1931
• Preludes for Memnon, 1931
• And in the Hanging Garden, 1933
• Great Circle, 1933
• Among the Lost People, 1934
• King Coffin, 1934
• Landscape West of Eden, 1934
• Time in the Rock; Preludes to Definition, 1936
• A Heart for the Gods of Mexico, 1939
• And in the Human Heart, 1940
• Conversation, or, Pilgrim's Progress: A Domestic Symphony, 1940
• Brownstone Eclogues, and Other Poems, 1942
• The Soldier: A Poem, 1944
• An Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry, 1945 (ed. with W.R. Benét)
• The Kid, 1947
• The Divine Pilgrim, 1949
• Skylight One: Fifteen Poems, 1949
• The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, 1950
• Ushant: An Essay, 1952
• Collected Poems, 1953 (The National Book Award)
• A Letter from Li Po and Other Poems, 1955
• The Flute Player, 1956
• Mr. Arcularis: A Play, 1957 (play, based on a short story from Among the Lost People, 1934)
  - TV drama 1956, in Studio One, teleplay Robert Herridge, dir. Karl Genus, starring John Drainie, Bramwell Fletcher and Betty Furness, Jonathan Harris; TV play 1959, in ITV Play of the Week; TV drama 1961, in Great Ghost Tales, dir. Karl Genus, starring John Abbott, Roger C. Carmel, Dan Morgan, Lois Nettleton
• A Reviewer's ABC; Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken from  1916 to the Present, 1958
• Sheepfold Hill: Fifteen Poems, 1958
• The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, 1960 (pref. by Mark Schorer)
• Selected Poems, 1961
• The Morning Song of Lord Zero, Poems Old and New, 1963
• A Seizure of Limericks, 1964
  
• The Collected Novels of Conrad Aiken, 1964 (introd. by R. P. Blackmur)
• Cats and Bats and Things with Wings, 1965 (drawings by Milton Glaser)
• Tom, Sue, and the Clock, 1966 (illustrated by Julie Maas)
• Preludes, 1966
• Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, 1966 (preface by Walter Allen)
• Thee: A Poem, 1967 (drawings by Leonard Baskin)
• Collected Criticism, 1968 (formerly A Reviewer’s ABC, introduced by Rufus A. Blanshard)
• The Clerk's Journal, Bing the Diary of a Queer Man; an Undergraduate Poem, Together with a Brief Memoir of Harvard, Dean Briggs and T. S. Eliot , 1971
• A Little Who's Zoo of Mild Animals, 1977 (illustrated by John Vernon Lord)
• Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken, 1978 (edited by Joseph Killorin)
• The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, 1982 (introduction by Robert Penn Warren)
• The Letters of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry, 1929-1954, 1992 (edited by Cynthia C. Sugars)
• Selected Poems, 2003 (with a new foreword by Harold Bloom)