"Surely the basis of all poetic activity, its sine qua non, its very essence, lies in the individual's ability, and need, to isolate for feeling and contemplation the relation 'I:World.' That, in fact, is the begin-all-end-all business of the poet's life."¹ This sentence contains the gist of Aiken's poetics. The poet sees himself as observer whose object of investigation is the nature and meaning of the human experience. What intrigued Akien throughout his life was the fact that all such investigation implies a threefold difficulty: first, the examination of any object calls for an artificial isolation of that object which necessarily falsifies it; second, both the object under investigation and the recording mind are themselves processes; and third, truth is a matter of total interdependence, in other words, it is a relationship and not a logical true or false value statement. Aiken never lost sight of this preoccupation and constantly reshaped and refined his concept of the relationship "I:World." He did so in his essays, in his short stories, in his novels, and most superbly in his poetry.

Poem XIX of Preludes for Memnon is a fine example of Aiken's central concern:

Watch long enough, and you will see the leaf
Fall from the bough. Without a sound it falls:
And soundless meets the grass …And so you have
A bare bough, and a dead leaf in dead grass.
Something has come and gone. And that is all.

But what were all the tumults in this action?
What wars of atoms in the twig, what ruins,
Fiery and disastrous, in the leaf?
Timeless the tumult was, but gave no sign.
Only, the leaf fell, and the bough is bare.

This is the world: there is no more than this.
The unseen and disastrous prelude, shaking
The trivial act from the terrific action.
Speak: and the ghosts of change, past and to come,
Throng the brief word. The maelstrom has us all.
(CP 520)

By focusing on one isolated object—the leaf—against the background of its seemingly stable surroundings, the poet observes a sudden change. The fall of the leaf is trivial in itself, but a contemplation of the chain of causes bringing about this event leads to the terrifying awareness that whatever change the human mind becomes conscious of is only a minute manifestation of a gigantic invisible commotion, the unceasing microcosmic and macroscosmic "pour of atoms and of stars." The outer world, of which the observer is a small part, is reflected, moreover, in the flux of his own mind: a thought or utterance is always only the "brief word" of a moment, an ephemeral result of the fading insights of the past, anticipating and already initiating the not-yet focused views of the future. The single visible act, like the "brief word," gives us a sense of the passage of time, but is overestimated, like the moment of actual death. In effect everything is caught up in a maelstrom, in which there is neither right nor left nor wrong. Seen in this way, it is impossible to determine if the falling of a leaf, the death of a person, or the destruction of a world is an end, a middle, or a new beginning. The alliteration of "trivial act" and "terrific action" emphasizes the ironic opposition and relativity implied in all existence.

As we have seen, man's awareness of change and time results from the isolation of the observing self from the observed object. Poem LI from Time in the Rock demonstrates this dilemma of the mind:

The miracle said 'I' and then was still,
lost in the wing-bright sphere of his own wonder:
as if the river paused to say a river,
or thunder to self said thunder.

As once the voice had spoken, now the mind
uttered itself, and gave itself a name;
and in the instant all was changed, the world
two separate worlds became—

The indivisible unalterably divided;
the rock forever sundered from the eye;
henceforth the lonely self, by self anointed,
hostile to earth and sky.

Alas, good angel, loneliest of heroes!
pity your coward children, who become
afraid of loneliness, and long for rock
as sick men long for home.
(CP 714)

Man only wins his selfhood at the inevitable price of loneliness, for self-awareness destroys his original union with nature. In the third stanza Aiken expresses this concern by two of his favorite symbols, rock and eye: the rock stands for undivided existence or sheer being. The eye, the mind's tool to measure the distance between itself and the world and to see the world in perspective, stands for self-awareness; elsewhere Aiken puns on the homophony of eye and I. The good angel of the last stanza is the poet-genius. Because of his higher awareness of the human condition, he is even lonelier than the rest of us. Yet, at the same time, he is beyond the common fear and terror of daily life as he realizes that it is precisely due to the alienation of the self that conscious man has a chance to gain an understanding—however fragmentary—of himself and of his position in the universe.

Almost all of Aiken's early poetry, including the volumes Turns and Movies, The Divine Pilgrim, and John Deth, is characterized by an attitude of ironic scepticism: in a world of flux where the self is not even capable of knowing its true essence and of distinguishing itself from the other masked selves that move, like so many vaudeville players, across the stage of life and mind, communication between the different solipsistic selves can only be illusory. Yet, around 1930, while writing Preludes for Memnon, Aiken begins to turn away from this desperate view. Change is experienced not only as loss but as the potential birth of something new. The moment of change itself may be ephemeral and the word that captures it brief, yet this is all we have, it is the essential human experience which reveals the very nature of the relationship "I:World." Therefore, Aiken makes this moment the focal point of much of his poetry.

All language, but above all, the writing of a poem, brings about a fixation of life's ever-moving kaleidoscope, presenting it—in Aiken's words—"as a rainbow, frozen." Thus, the artifact seems to give meaning to the instant at least. But Aiken goes on to ask: "And is this truth? / Or is the grassblade, by itself, the grass?" The answer is obviously: no. Only the sum total of all instants and all things and all thoughts and all poems could be called "truth." As it is, this poem, as well as all other works of art, is at best a "prelude," which is only of relative value. Nevertheless, it is the best we can do to understand our existence.

It is above all the task of poetry to grasp the critical point where world becomes language or where the unconscious turns conscious. For Aiken, the prototype of this process of transformation is the act of writing. A great part of his work is therefore poetological, i.e., the process of writing becomes itself the theme. No wonder Aiken considers his final versions only as preliminaries. They are structures where "wound" becomes "word" becomes "world,"² or, to put it differently, where immediate individual experience (wound) is translated into linguistic structure (word) which, in the reader's mind, becomes an independent part of reality (world) capable of causing new personal experiences. In an essay on Rilke, Aiken writes that "the poem is simply a part of what is an indivisible whole of experience, and itself no more an 'end-product' of anything than it is the 'beginning' of anything. To Rilke …[a]ll things were to be seen, loved, filtered into the unconscious, there to be turned magically into names: and then the poetry is the naming."³

The problem of naming is one of the major poetic subjects of Aiken's oeuvre. Is there a linguistic equivalent for experience? Aiken is skeptical.

Despair, that seeking for the ding-an-sich,
The feeling itself, the round bright dark emotion,
The color, the light, the depth, the feathery swiftness
Of you and the thought of you, I fall and fall
From precipice word to chasm word, and shatter
Heart, brain, and spirit on the maddening fact:
If poetry says it, it must speak with a symbol.
(CP5O3)

"What is a symbol?" The poet asks next, and after enumerating some images which might serve as "objective correlatives" for some experience, he finally concludes: "The thought, the ghost of thought, the ghost in a mirror." (CP 503) "The ghost of thought" hints at the loss of substance inherent in every process of verbalization; "the ghost in a mirror" refers to the element of reflexivity characteristic of Aiken's own poetry for, in his poems, he very often does not transcribe the "process of naming" itself but instead the process of philosophizing about the process of naming. This poetological and philosophical approach to poetry sometimes results in a kind of self-conscious verse that is more interesting than poetical. T. S. Eliot, who repeatedly dealt with this problem in his essays and who, no doubt, discussed these matters with his friend Conrad Aiken, wrote that, ideally, the poet should succeed, as Dante did, "in dealing with his philosophy, not as a theory … or as his own comment or reflection, but in terms of something perceived"⁴ that is, in terms of experience—of poetic truth. This is precisely what Aiken tries to do in his autobiography Ushant, where the experience of thinking about the process of naming translates itself directly into seemingly endless concatenations of clauses, subclauses, and interpolations:

How shall the non-knower, who is in process of becoming the knower, convert himself into a language by which, first, to unravel his own beginnings and outlines against the matrix in which, like a trilobite … he found himself embedded, and then, with this basic knowledge, and out of its now co-ordinated constituents, begin a parallel 'arrangement' of the world itself, the world outside and beyond (but within oneself too)—the microcosm, with full awareness of the laws and limitations of microcosm (but in love with it, just the name, and proud of its prismatic importance) receiving into itself the macrocosm, a world within a world—? How indeed!—And nevertheless, it was in this really staggering drama that every living human being was involved, to greater or less degree, every day of his life." (Ushant 324)

In his poems Aiken usually resorts to analogies and metaphors and frequently uses inner dialogues or exhortative addresses to the soul to express the two-fold process of reflection. In Prelude XXI, for example, Aiken urges the "poor soul" to plunge again and again "from time's colossal brink into that chasm," to bring up, with "blood-stained hands," sandgrain after sandgrain, until it finds the "pearl of brightness." The originally biblical pearl symbolizes the poetic vision of beauty and knowledge which dissolves the polarities of inner and outer worlds in a momentary poetic epiphany, a unified vision:

This passage demonstrates Aiken's preference for critical turning points: the breaking wave, the opening up of the rose, the evening, the twilight. We also note the interesting detail, that the "immortal bloom" of ultimate truth is made up of "myriad things forgotten" as well as things "remembered," by sandgrains as well as by the pearl. Not only is the consciousness that finds its lasting form in a work of art of importance, but all humanity works together in building up the "Cosmic Sum" of being.

Yet, a haphazard pursuit of single moments of awareness is not Aiken's ultimate goal. By persistently writing about the processes in his mind and then collating what he has written, Aiken tries to create a unified theory of consciousness, which he calls his "consistent view." He thereby pursues two aims. He hopes, first, that his method will enable him to understand the difficult phases of his life and the darker levels of his mind and to accept them as meaningful parts of an evolving self; and second, he hopes to be able to put his private experience at the service of society. Every record of an individual consciousness is a step toward the development of man's collective consciousness; that these records may outlast their time or be lost and forgotten is, as we have seen in the poem above, of no importance. Partly in a mystical, partly in a genetic sense, every item of information is forever part of the whole. We are all pilgrims on our way to divine consciousness, pioneers in an endless war on the unconscious. This is Aiken's version of two important American topoi: as a sort of latter-day Emerson he affirms that "in the evolution of man's consciousness, ever widening and deepening and subtilizing his awareness, and in his dedication of himself to this supreme task, man possesses all that he could possibly require in the way of a religious credo: when the half-gods go, the gods arrive: he can, if he only will, become divine." (CP 1021) As a pioneer of the mind he strives to extend the frontier of consciousness as far into the unknown as possible:

Live for the frontier of the daily unknown, of terror,
for the darkness hidden in the striking hand,
the darkness opening in the thinking mind,
the darkness under the valve of the beating heart:
live for the borderland, the daybreak, whence we start
to live and love, and if we cannot live to forgive:
(CP 870)

The more conscious a human being is, the more forcefully can he fight on the frontier of knowledge. In Aiken's view it is the artist who is equipped with the most sensitive antenna of the mind, as well as with the necessary linguistic tools to make the progress of human awareness manifest to society. In the essay "Poetry and the Mind of Modern Man," Aiken sums up his philosophy:

Poetry has always kept easily abreast with the utmost man can do in extending the horizon of his consciousness, whether outward or inward. It has always been the most flexible, the most comprehensive, the most farseeing, and hence the most successful, of the modes by which he has accepted the new in experience, realized it, and adjusted himself to it. Whether it is a change in his conception of the heavens, or of the law of gravity, or of morality, or of the nature of consciousness, it has always at last been in poetry that man has given his thought its supreme expression—which is to say that most of all, in this, he succeeds in making real for himself the profound myth of personal existence and experience.

But if poetry is to accomplish this in any age, it must think: it must embody the full consciousness of man at that given moment. It cannot afford to lag behind the explorations of knowledge, whether of the inner or outer worlds: these it is its business to absorb and transmute.⁵

Aiken's need to make "real for himself the profound myth of personal existence and experience" was certainly a powerful motivation for the development of his particular poetic theory. The pervasive image of the "wound" to be turned into "word" is related to that traumatic moment when, as an eleven-year-old boy, Aiken was awakened by revolver shots and discovered that his father had killed his mother and then himself. Even if not all of Aiken's work can be explained as an attempt to reshape that scene so as to come to terms with it, we may safely conclude that this experience has something to do with the characteristic movement of many of his poems. The poet usually begins by describing some personal experience which, however, he does not seem to trust until he has explored its inner causes. Then he moves outward again to generalize his newly won insight by means of an analogy. Aiken's need to discover a meaning in his own life makes him look for recurring patterns; thus, seemingly accidental events take on an aspect of preordained fate and become, in turn, the basis for future meanings. The poet traces the evolution of his personal life back to the lives of his parents and ancestors and sees his poetic vocation as a task inherited from his family. In his autobiography we read:

This 'thing' of the family's, this accumulated awareness, this evolving consciousness, even with its taint of insanity, this it was their duty, and D.'s [i.e., the narrator's] most of all, as now for the moment their ephemeral spokesman, to put at the disposal of society—even, if necessary, on the chopping-block or the dissecting table. (Ushant 305)

But it was his maternal grandfather, the Reverend William Potter, whose sermons Aiken carried with him wherever he went, who had the most marked influence on the shaping of the poet's "consistent view." Aiken admired above all his grandfather's relentless struggle against enslaving dogma and his "determined acceptance of Darwin and all the rest of the scientific fireworks of the nineteenth century."⁶ Together with Emerson and Colonel Higginson, the Reverend Potter had founded the Free Religious Association which was intended to unite all the religions of the world. In an interview with Robert Hunter Wilbur, Aiken explained: "this inheritance has been my guiding light: I regard myself simply as a continuance of my grandfather, and primarily, therefore, as a teacher and preacher, and a distributor, in poetic terms, of the news of the world, by which I mean new knowledge."⁷

Aiken's most beautiful poetic transformation of his grandfather's views is a passage in "Hallowe'en," a poem, in which the poet addresses his ancestor in a reminiscing inner monologue. After enumerating a number of things that his grandfather might wish to see again, if he could come back among the living, the poet concludes:

Yet no, not these are your loves, but the timeless and formless,
the laws and the vision: as you saw on the ship
how, like an angel, she subdued to her purpose
the confused power of ocean, the diffused power of wind,
translating them swiftly to beauty,
'so infinite ends, and finite begins, so man
may make the god finite and viable,
make conscious god's power in action and being.'
(CP 896)

Although the metaphor of the ship and its interpretation have been taken literally from his grandfather's diary, it is obvious that Aiken here expresses his own conviction. As we have seen before, angel, in Aiken's poetry, symbolizes the poet-genius, the mind in its highest state of consciousness. This lucid mind is likened to a sailboat which, on a windy ocean, transforms the confused power of the unconscious (the ocean) and concentrates the diffused power of the spirit (the wind) into an aesthetic and moral force, able to direct man's life.

But beyond his interest in the history of his personal ancestors, Aiken was also greatly concerned with the roots of American culture and therefore, like Pound and Eliot, emigrated to England, where he continued to live for many years. After his return to New England, however, he admitted: "I preferred the English tradition, and lived there for many years, because that seemed to me what I needed. Later, the fortunes of another war sent me back to America, where I found that my ancestral roots claimed me—I should have remained there all the time. / And the truth is that James was wrong, and so were Eliot and myself, and all the others, in thinking that there was an insufficient cultural inheritance in this country: it was there, but neither our teachers nor ourselves were yet aware of it. In Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Mark Twain, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, and James, what more could the ripening consciousness of this country, which in a curious way was both old and young, demand?"⁸

Although Aiken used every conceivable poetic form from sonnet to free verse, much of his poetry is experimental in the sense that he never followed what was fashionable in his time. This fact is often cited as a reason for his lack of popularity. Yet, for all his independence, he was extremely conscious of the poetic tradition: both past and contemporary literature is an integral part of his work. In the form of echoes, quotations, subtexts, images, and thoughts the reader can recognize the subtle presences of Eliot, Pound, Masefield, Whitman, Poe, and Shakespeare. Aiken explicitly commends Eliot for being "inseparably linked with tradition, his genius at war with it, but compelled to speak in its terms," and says, "it is out of such violent conflicts within the tradition that new forms, and new works of art, arise."⁹ Aiken's notion of the literary tradition may have been slightly more personal than Eliot's, but it is nevertheless similar to it. For both Aiken and Eliot the "articulate formulation of life which human minds make" forms a kind of "ideal order," an order comparable to the one that Eliot advances in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," where he defines "the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written." This concept of literary tradition resembles Aiken's evolving collective consciousness which, like Eliot's "tradition," enables a modern mind to become aware of something vague like "the mind of Europe," a spiritual presence which changes but "which abandons nothing en route.¹⁰

Eliot claimed that at times a poet may have "a feeling of profound kinship, or rather a peculiar intimacy, with another, probably a dead author" and that such an "imperative intimacy arouses for the first time a real, an unshakable confidence" that "we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of tradition."¹¹ This, according to Eliot, cannot happen unless the poet "lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living."¹² For Aiken, the spirits of his "godfathers, Will and Ben" (i.e., William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson) (CP 869) are not the only ones still pervading his Cape Cod residence; in a poem called "A Letter from Li Po," he also conjures up the spirit of that old Chinese poet:

Yet to spell down the poem on her page,
margining her phrases, parsing forth
the sevenfold prism of meaning, up the scale
from chicory pink to blue, is to assume
Li Po himself: as he before assumed
the poets and the sages who were his.
Like him, we too have eaten of the word:
with him are somewhere lost beyond the Gorge:
and write, in rain, a letter to lost children,
a letter long as time and brief as love.
(CP 903-904)

Every writer "assumes" his precursors. He is mysteriously connected with the "all-remembering world" carried on the Chinese "Wind Wheel Circle." While composing this poem on Li Po, Aiken was "stirred by the ancient currents" that gave him birth, and felt very much at one with his own ancestors as well as with his spiritual forebears and ultimately with all mankind:

The linear time of Aiken's early poetry, symbolized in the falling leaf, has finally been transformed into the spiral time characteristic of his later work. The present moment is no longer conceived merely as transition and loss, but has assumed a quality of nunc stans, of mystical continuity. Here we are reminded of Eliot's "Four Quartets," yet, there is a difference in attitude. For Aiken the eternal principle underlying time is not the Christian God; it is rather a consciousness-becoming life-principle, a power which grows ever more manifest to itself in the history of the cosmos and of human consciousness. The individual human being, however, must always experience the moment as transitory: he can at best attain Aiken's confidence that what eludes him is forever preserved in the recollection of the Cosmic Consciousness, where permanence and progress are coeval. By intuiting this Cosmic Consciousness in the act of writing, mind and object, experience and text, become one:

There can be no doubt that this "other text that knows no year" is—in the last analysis—a secularized and modernized version of the Puritan topos of the Book of Life. It is in this "immortal text" that the "trivial acts" of human existence are once more redeemed in the "terrific action" of the ever developing ulrratext, Aiken's collective consciousness.

Notes

All excerpts from Aiken's poetry are taken from Conrad Aiken, Collected Poems 1916-1970 (New York 1970). This volume is cited as CP in the text.

¹ Quoted in John R. Moore, "Conrad Aiken: The Egotistical Sublime," Sewanee Review 74 (1966), 699.

² Cf. CP 612 and CP 672.

³ Conrad Aiken, Collected Criticism (formerly A Reviewer's ABC), (London, 1968), 332.

⁴ Quoted in E. P. Bollier, "T. S. Eliot and F. H. Bradley: a Question of Influence," Tulane Studies in English 12 (1962), 101.

⁵ Conrad Aiken, "Poetry and the Mind of Modern Man," The Atlantic, 214 (5), Nov. 1964, 81.

⁶ Robert Hunter Wilbur, "Art of Poetry IX: Conrad Aiken, an Interview," Paris Review, 11 (1968), 120.

⁷ Ibid., 120.

⁸ Conrad Aiken, "Poetry and the Mind of Modern Man," 79.

⁹ Conrad Aiken, Collected Criticism, 386.

¹⁰ T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and Individual Talent," in The Sacred Wood (London, 1960), 51.

¹¹ T. S. Eliot, "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry, IV," Egoist, VI (July 1919), 38-40.

¹² T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," 59.