Conrad Aiken Biography Quotes 4 Report mistakes

Early Life
Conrad Potter Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1889, into a household of professional ambition and cultural aspiration. His father, Dr. William Ford Aiken, was a prominent physician, and his mother, Anna Potter Aiken, brought New England ties and literary awareness to the home. Aiken's childhood, however, was marked by a trauma that shaped his imagination and lifelong themes: in 1901 his father killed his mother and then himself, an event the boy discovered. Afterward Aiken was taken north to New Bedford, Massachusetts, to live with relatives on his mother's side. The abrupt shift from the lush, coastal South to a sober New England port, combined with the early confrontation with mortality, supplied the motifs of sea, snow, silence, and inwardness that repeatedly animate his poetry and fiction.

Education and Early Influences
Aiken attended Harvard University, where he worked on the Harvard Advocate and formed friendships that helped define his literary course. Chief among these was T. S. Eliot, whose rigor and sense of tradition gave Aiken both a counterpart and a foil. At Harvard Aiken also encountered the psychological ideas of William James and, through reading, the theories of Sigmund Freud; these influences helped him shape a poetics attentive to dream, memory, and the layered consciousness. Early publications showed a musical line, a symbolist inheritance from poets like Mallarme and Laforgue, and a willingness to fuse narrative and lyric forms.

Emergence as Poet and Fiction Writer
Through the 1910s and 1920s Aiken published a stream of poetry and prose that brought him a wide reputation. The long poem Senlin: A Biography offered a persona through which to explore identity's fluidity and life's cyclical motions. In prose he ventured into psychologically probing, technically adventurous novels such as Blue Voyage and later Great Circle and King Coffin. His short fiction became some of his most enduring work: Silent Snow, Secret Snow distilled a descent into interiority with frightening calm, while Mr. Arcularis and other tales probed the uncanny borders between life, dream, and death.

Life in England and Literary Circles
Aiken spent long periods in England, especially in the coastal town of Rye, East Sussex. There he moved among modernist circles that included, at different points, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford, while maintaining contact with old friend T. S. Eliot. His rooms and later his house in Rye were lively centers for conversation, mentorship, and editorial counsel. The younger novelist Malcolm Lowry, struggling to shape his own voice, found in Aiken a sympathetic reader and exacting guide. These years abroad reinforced Aiken's cosmopolitan sensibility and his conviction that American writing gained depth from dialogue with European forms and philosophies.

Critic, Editor, and Advocate
Alongside his creative work, Aiken was an incisive critic who wrote essays and reviews for major magazines, arguing for seriousness of craft and psychological depth in modern literature. He championed poets whose music and thought he admired and wrote perceptively about American precursors such as Emily Dickinson. The through-line of his criticism, skeptical, exact, and attentive to rhythm, mirrored his poems' concern with how consciousness finds form in language.

Honors and Public Roles
Recognition followed steadily. In 1930 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems, establishing him among the foremost American poets of his generation. In the early 1950s he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a role later known as the U.S. Poet Laureate, during which he fostered a broad, historically minded view of American verse. His Collected Poems earned the National Book Award in the mid-1950s, affirming the sustained quality of a career that had already spanned decades.

Personal Life
Aiken's private life was woven into his work. He married three times. With his first wife, Jessie, he had three children, including the writers Jane Aiken Hodge and Joan Aiken, both of whom carried forward the family's literary lineage in their own distinctive ways. After that marriage ended, he wed Clarissa Lorenz; their union, sometimes tempestuous, later figured in her memoir of their years together. His third marriage, to the artist Mary Hoover, brought stability and companionship; Mary's visual acuity and discipline offered an artistic counterpoint to his own labors and travels. The friendships that sustained him, above all with T. S. Eliot, but also with contemporaries and younger writers, formed a sustaining network through professional shifts and geographic moves.

Later Years and Legacy
After decades divided between England and the northeastern United States, Aiken renewed his ties to Savannah in his later years, returning often to the maritime landscapes that had shaped his earliest perceptions. He published Ushant, an autobiographical meditation that braided memory, portraiture of fellow writers, and the ordeal of self-making into a single, sea-haunted book. The late poems maintain his characteristic clarity of ear and preoccupation with time, recurrence, and the self's many masks. He died in 1973, leaving a body of work remarkable for its tonal range and formal experiment across poetry, fiction, and criticism.

Aiken's grave in Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery is marked by a bench engraved with the legend he cherished from a ship's name glimpsed in youth: "Cosmos Mariner, Destination Unknown". It is an epitaph fitting for a writer who made the voyage of consciousness his life's subject, balancing music and thought, the Southern coast and the North Atlantic, private grief and public art. Through the achievements of his daughters Jane and Joan, through the testimony of friends like T. S. Eliot and the gratitude of writers such as Malcolm Lowry, and through the continuing presence of Silent Snow, Secret Snow and Senlin in classrooms and anthologies, Conrad Aiken endures as a pivotal American voice linking the psychological inwardness of modernism to the broader currents of twentieth-century literature.

Our collection contains 4 quotes who is written by Conrad, under the main topics: Mortality - I Love You - Heartbreak - Youth.