[Aiken] was a poet essentially, but he was also the complete man of letters, distinguished for his work in many forms of verse and prose. The unity was there, however, and in every form he spoke with the same candid, scrupulous, self-deprecatory, yet reckless and fanciful New England voice. (p. 231)

[Candor] was close to being his central principle as a man and a writer, particularly as a poet. The principle evolved into a system of aesthetics and literary ethics that unified his work, a system based on the private and public value of self-revelation. No matter what sort of person the poet might be, healthy or neurotic, Aiken believed that his real business was "to give the low-down on himself, and through himself on humanity." (p. 233)

"Look within thyself to find the truth" might have been his Emersonian motto; and it had the corollary that inner truth corresponds to outer truth, as self or microcosm does to macrocosm. Aiken believed that the writer should be a surgeon performing an exploratory operation on himself, at whatever cost to his self-esteem, and penetrating as with a scalpel through layer after layer of the semiconscious. That process of achieving self-knowledge might well become a self-inflicted torture…. Let him persist, however, and he will be rewarded by finding—here I quote from a letter—"what you think or feel that is secretly you—shamefully you—intoxicatingly you." Then, having laid bare this secret self, which is also a universal self, the writer must find words for it, accurate and honest words, but poured forth—Aiken says in a Prelude—without reckoning the consequences: "Let us be reckless of our words and worlds,/And spend them freely as the tree his leaves." Here enters the public as opposed to the merely private value of complete self-revelation. By finding words for his inmost truth, the writer—especially the poet—has made it part of the world, part of human consciousness. (pp. 233-34)

The writer must divide himself into two persons, one the observer, the other a subject to be observed, and the first must approach the second "with relentless and unsleeping objectivity." The observer-and-narrator must face what Aiken calls "that eternal problem of language, language extending consciousness and then consciousness extending language, in circular or spiral ascent"; and he must also face the many problems of architectural and sequential form. The words that depict the observed self not only must be honest; they must be "twisted around," in Aiken's phrase, until they have a shape and structure of their own; until they become an "artifact" (a favorite word of his) and if possible a masterpiece that will have a lasting echo in other minds. The "supreme task" performed by a masterpiece—as well as by lesser works and deeds in a more temporary fashion—is that of broadening, deepening, and subtilizing the human consciousness. Any man who devotes himself to that evolving task will find in it, Aiken says, "all that he could possibly require in the way of a religious credo."

His name for the credo was "the religion of consciousness." It is a doctrine—or more than that, a system of belief—to which he gave many refinements and ramifications. Some of these are set forth, with an impressive density of thought and feeling, in two long series of philosophical lyrics, Preludes for Memnon (1931) and Time in the Rock (1936); Aiken regarded these as his finest works. But the doctrine is a unifying theme in almost all the poetry of his middle years, say from 1925 to 1956, and in the prose as well. It is clearly exemplified in his novels, especially in Blue Voyage (1927) … and Great Circle (1933)…. Self-discovery is often the climax of Aiken's stories, and it is, moreover, the true theme of his autobiography, Ushant (1952). (pp. 234-35)

In American literature there is nothing to compare with it except The Education of Henry Adams, which is equally well composed, equally an artifact … but which gives us only one side of the author. In Ushant the author writes in the third person, like Adams, and maintains the same objective tone while recording not only his "education" but also his faults and obsessions, his infidelities, his recurrent dreams, his uproarious or shabby adventures: in short, while trying "to give the lowdown on himself, and through himself on humanity." (p. 236)

Without in the least abandoning his religion of consciousness, Aiken's poems of the fifties and sixties introduced some new or partially new elements. One of these was a note of ancestral piety, with allusions to earlier Aikens, but more to his mother's connections, the Potters … and the Delanos. The note is already audible in "Mayflower," written in 1945. It is a poem partly about the ship (on which two of the poet's ancestors had been passengers), partly about the flower, and partly about the sandy shores of Cape Cod, where the Pilgrims had landed before sailing on to Plymouth. In other poems there is frequent mention of what might be called ancestral scenes: New Bedford and its whaling ships; the Quaker Graveyard at South Yarmouth, on the Cape, where Cousin Abiel lies buried; Sheepfold Hill, also on the Cape; and Stony Brook, where the herring used to spawn by myriads. There is also talk of "godfathers" and tutelary spirits: among the poets Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Li Po, and among historical figures Pythagoras and William Blackstone, the scholar and gentle heretic who built a house on the site of Boston before the Puritans came, then moved away from them into the wilderness. Blackstone becomes the hero of Aiken's cycle of poems about America, The Kid. (p. 239)

Another new or newly emphasized feature of the later poems is something very close to New England Transcendentalism. Its appearance should be no surprise, except to those who have fallen into the habit of regarding Transcendentalism as a purely historical phenomenon, a movement that flourished from 1830 to 1860, then disappeared at the beginning of the Civil War. On the contrary, it has been a durable property of New England thinking, a home place, one might say, to which some poets return as they grow older. (pp. 239-40)

Is consciousness, for Aiken—the consciousness of mankind as shared by each individual—close to being an equivalent of the Over-Soul? That might be stretching a point, and indeed, I should be far from saying that among twentieth-century New England writers there is any complete Transcendentalist in a sense that might be accepted, for instance, by Margaret Fuller. (p. 241)

[Bold] in his development of certain Transcendental notions, [Aiken] also, rather late in life, found them confirmed by ancestral piety and especially by the writings and career of his maternal grandfather. (p. 242)

When the poet came to read Grandfather Potter's published sermons, he was impressed by their bold speculations about the divine element in men. He wrote an admiring poem about his grandfather, "Hallowe'en," in which he quoted from the journal that Potter had kept during his early travels in Europe. A quoted phrase was "… so man may make the god finite and viable, make conscious god's power in action and being." That sounds the Transcendental note, and it is also close to phrases that Aiken himself had written: for example, in the 1949 preface to one of his Symphonies, where he says that man, in becoming completely aware of himself, "can, if he only will, become divine."

There is another point, apparently not connected with Grandfather Potter, at which Aiken comes even closer to Transcendentalism…. Aiken, with his senses open to the tangible world, often speaks of [the correspondence between the physical world and the human mind], which sometimes becomes for him an identity. (pp. 242-43)

Aiken is … clearly Emersonian … in what is almost the last of his poems, THEE, written when he was seventy-seven. Though comparatively short …, it is indeed one of his major works. First, one notes in it that the poet has changed his style and that—as, to a lesser extent, in some of the other late poems—he has abandoned the subtle variations and dying falls of his earlier work. THEE is written in short, galloping lines with rhymes like hoofbeats:

                 Who is that splendid THEE
                 who makes a symphony
                 of the one word
                 be
                 admitting us to see
                 all things but THEE?

Obviously THEE is being used as the Quaker pronoun: "Thee makes," not "You make" or "Thou makest." Aiken may well have learned that usage from the Potter family. As for his question "Who?" it sends us back once more to Emerson. Just as Aiken's "consciousness" at times comes close to being the Emersonian Over-Soul, so THEE is the spirit of Nature itself as defined in Emerson's essay. "Strictly speaking," the essay says, "… all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under the name, NATURE." Aiken's name for it is THEE, but has a different connotation. Whereas Emerson's Nature is admired for revealing in each of its parts the universal laws that wise men obey, Aiken's THEE is a pitiless force that nourishes and destroys with the divine indifference of the goddess Kali. Also and paradoxically, it is a force evolving with the human spirit…. (pp. 243-44)

[Where] Emerson celebrates the power of the indwelling spirit, Aiken gives a twist to Transcendental doctrine by stressing, first, the indifferent power of THEE, and then the dependence of THEE on the individual consciousness—with which it must "meet and mate," from which it learns to become more truly itself, and with which, perhaps, it must die. The speculation seems more imaginative than philosophical, and yet one feels that—along with the whole religion of consciousness—it finds a place in the Transcendental line.

In Aiken's beginnings, he had been poles apart from Emerson. He had been atheistic and pessimistic, not optimistic and Unitarian. He never had been impressed by the German Romantic philosophers or by the Neoplatonists, let alone by Sufism and Brahmanism; instead, his intellectual models had been Poe first of all, then Santayana, Freud, and Henry James…. Nevertheless, at the end of his long career, he had worked round to a position reminiscent of that which Emerson had reached in 1831, before he had published anything. (p. 246)

For the neglect of his work by the public, one can give several explanations, though none of them seems adequate. In the early days when he was writing a book-length poem every year, Aiken's poetry was too modern and experimental for him to share in what was then the enormous popularity of Amy Lowell and Vachel Lindsay; then in the twenties it seemed not experimental enough, or at least not eccentric enough. In the thirties it was condemned as having no social or revolutionary meaning; in the forties it wasn't rich enough in images (most of his work is musical rather than visual, and music was becoming the lost side of poetry); in the fifties it was condemned again as not being "close enough in texture" to suit the intensive reading methods of the new critics (but what about the Preludes?); and in the sixties it was disregarded as being written mostly in iambic pentameter, a measure that had fallen out of fashion. Aiken followed his own fashion, and his work developed by an inner logic which was not that of the poetry-reading public. (p. 247)