Aiken, Conrad | Louis Untermeyer (essay date 1967)
Louis Untermeyer (essay date 1967)
SOURCE: "Conrad Aiken: Our Best Known Unread Poet," in Saturday Review (New York), Vol. 50, No. 47, November 25, 1967, pp. 28-9, 76-7.
[In the following essay, Untermeyer reviews Aiken's prolific career as a poet and observes that his work rarely provokes anything other than strong feelings, whether positive or negative, from its readers.]
The case of Conrad Aiken is as singular as it is confusing. Practically no criticism of his work has struck anything like a balance. The great quantity of his writing and its stubbornly idiosyncratic quality combine to preclude a tempered estimate. He has been condemned for an all-too-ready rhetoric and he has been exalted for a superb command of the poetic art.
One of the most prolific and definitely the most versatile of poets, Aiken, at the age of seventy-eight, has published twenty-seven volumes of poetry, five novels, five collections of short stories, two...
[The entire page is 3969 words long]
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