The present and ongoing critical estimate of Conrad Aiken continues to be one of modern American letters' most bizarre phenomenons. While a small number of supporters quietly insist that he may justifiably be considered as among the three or four most important poets of the century, his reputation languishes, as it has for decades, amid a detritus of misinformation, faulty generalization, and often well-intentioned but unperceptive commentary. Among the many reasons which can plausibly be brought forward to explain Aiken's obscurity is that following much of the confused response and opprobrium generated by his early verse, he deliberately ceased attempts to "explain" his poetry. Although he published ten volumes of poetry between 1914 and 1925,¹ Aiken's early verse has received essentially no productive reevaluation, as a brief survey of influential critical judgments spanning a period of nearly forty years makes apparent.

Dismissing as nonexistent the ethical content of the poetry contained in Aiken's first nine books, Louis Untermeyer wrote in 1925 that "The Road" (in Priapus and the Pool and Other Poems, published the same year) constituted "the first poem of Aiken's which expresses compassion for humanity at large and a participation in its struggles."² Apparently ignorant of the fact that Aiken's specifically "Freudian" phase ended before 1920, Horace Gregory, in 1942, pigeon-holed Aiken as a decadent:

The failures and the never-quite-attained successes are as perceptible in his early books as in his latest—the melodious vagueness, the emphasis upon the theme of sexual adventure, reiterated in terms of the slightly soiled, amateur discussions of Freud during the 1920's, the special "artiness" of that same period which never failed to include its heritage of the 1890's from the pages of Henry Harland's The Yellow Book.³

Despite the fact that Aiken's early poetry bristles with themes and metaphors drawn from an extensive knowledge of natural science and medicine, Frederick Hoffman, twenty years after Gregory, chorused that the first several books contain "no intellectual substance."⁴ Contrary to such widely held assessments, however, it is emphatically clear that both intellectual principles and ethical beliefs jointly determined the content of Aiken's poetry, from The Clerk's Journal (1910-11) through Thee (1967). It is with the genesis and moral vision of Aiken's earliest major poem that the present essay shall be concerned.

Conrad Aiken wrote The Clerk's Journal during the winter of 1910-11 while a student at Harvard. The poem remained unpublished until 1971, when The Eakins Press brought out a facsimile edition containing an introductory memoir by Aiken. Looking back over a period of some sixty years, the eighty-year-old author called his literally long-lost narrative "unmistakably the work of a very young man."⁵ Yet the poem, he went on to suggest, still sounded the note of the "modern." Aiken recalled how he and T. S. Eliot, his friend and classmate, had mutually sought "a new poetic voice, one in which one could think." Forgetting that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" had been completed during the summer of 1911, Aiken compared his own poem with his friend's more successful, if not seminal, endeavor:

Written in 1910, several years before "Prufrock," it is already talking of lunch-counters, plates of beans, the moon among telephone wires, and life being paved with cobblestones. The shift is on.⁶

While for both "the shift" towards modernist aesthetics was on, it is essential to keep in mind the very different sensibilities of the two aspiring poets. Aiken, for example, never shared Eliot's anguished spirituality, nor did he seek visionary experiences or wish for prophetic, private knowledge.⁷ Aiken's deterministic naturalism precluded, a priori, the possibility that one might usefully imagine solutions for despair lying beyond the circumference of the too frequently tawdry quotidian. In his comparison of The Clerk's Journal with "Prufrock," Aiken inadvertently obscured the originality and merits of his own poem. By evaluating it "in terms of Eliot's very different work, he tacitly bolstered the critical position that his early verse failed to achieve a voice of its own. Yet such is not the case: while Aiken participated with Eliot and others in the modernist experiments with language and method, he steadfastly articulated an intellectual and ethical vision uniquely his own. That vision, moreover, owed very little to the contemporary literary milieu.

The Clerk's Journal is a two-part verse narrative of close to 450 lines which combines subjective portraiture with reflective analysis. The first part of the poem consists of the clerk's unfolding account of his short-lived romance with a waitress. The second part of the poem consists of the clerk's account of his attempts to diagnose his pain and depression following the break-up of his love affair. Insofar as The Clerk's Journal examines the matrix of its own construction, it represents, within the context of Aiken's career, a prototypical "work in progress": we observe the "changing mind" of the clerk as he struggles to create from immediate experience a poetic artifact which can help him to understand his emotions and behavior. He questions and analyzes his fluctuating moods and impulses, which range from an initially laconic cynicism to an intermediately joyful panhumanism to an ultimately resigned scepticism. His feelings are presented and evaluated both as discrete states of mind and as motor reflexes to external events over which he as an individual has little or no control. Taken together, these active and passive dimensions of the protagonist's consciousness allow Aiken to depict the clerk as both catalytic agent and self-scrutinizing specimen.

The Clerk's Journal is valuable today not because it represents an undiscovered "modernist" effort by a major poet, but because it provides insight into the early priorities of Aiken's thought. As early as 1910 it is clear that Aiken believed that the limits of knowledge expand in proportion to man's efforts to seek and disseminate selfknowledge. (The first epigraph in Aiken's autobiography, Ushant, published in 1952, is taken from Coleridge's Self-Knowledge.) Weighing against man's efforts to increase human intelligence is the retrogressive propensity to imagine that biological limitations can be transcended. Although Aiken did not deliberately attempt to extract an overriding philosophical theme from his psycho-biological interests prior to writing The Divine Pilgrim poems between 1915 and 1920, his naturalistic axioms clearly determined the ideational content of the verse written through 1914.

In several respects The Clerk's Journal anticipates what Aiken in 1912 described as an interest in making poetry from "the commonplace and sordid."⁸ The first of many pieces set in New York City, his tale in verse arose directly from the previous summer's residence "in a fine, slum boardinghouse near the Twenty-third Street Ferry, by the corner of Death Avenue." There, in 1910, the Harvard junior had tried to "convalesce" from "the Shelley and Keats and Coleridge diseases" picked up from two previous summers spent in the Lake District.⁹ By going to New York rather than to England, Aiken sought to repatriate and to urbanize himself by reading such "city" poets as Walt Whitman: "The city, the city … the summer in New York was the first real revel in it, the first saturation, and with old Walt, naturally, as guide."¹⁰ Like Whitman, Aiken in The Clerk's Journal would seek to celebrate not simply the passions and sufferings of his fictional hero, but also those of the encompassing human community.

Aiken hoped to depict what the Elizabethans understood as "common" behavior: i.e., behavior common to all men regardless of education, wealth, or social position. By using realistic characters and urban slang, he hoped to invigorate his verse and to help get poetry out of the parlor and back into the mainstream of contemporary life. In his initial efforts to "not at all restrict myself to the poetic vocabulary," however, Aiken sometimes attained bathetic heights.¹¹ The riotously Dreiserian description of a cafe as "a justly farfamed eating-joint," for example, no doubt contributed to his ultimate feeling that The Clerk's Journal could be "very funny when it didn't quite mean to be."¹²

Aiken's clerk first appears—as will Forslin, Senlin, and Festus—in an introspective mood, thinking about his immediate situation:

How these gray days affect the heart!
My pencil poised in air, I muse
In melancholy mood, apart
From life and all its daily news.
(I, 1)

Dispirited over the tedium of his drab and unvarying "life of fact," he looks through a "grimy window-pane" at "chimney-pots in wet array." The clerk, like one of Robert Frost's lonely, housebound New Englanders, feels painfully estranged yet at the same time insulated from the world beyond his window. The nature of the world from which he is in temporary retreat is not only drab, but enervatingly and forlornly mechanistic. The clerk views his life as both meaningless and redundant:

Today, in bed, I wondered why
Year after year, so patiently,
I rose at dawn, breakfasted,
And toiled the day through, wearily,
And wearily came home, to bed.
"And what's the use?"—I asked myself;
Yet every morning, just the same,
My cheap clock whirs upon its shelf:
wake, and rise to daily shame.
(I, 1)

Setting yet again an important pattern for subsequent Aiken protagonists, the clerk grapples with the question of his own sanity, so conscious is he of his mind's subjugation to the indifferent, relentless pressure of everyday reality: "Sometimes I think I'll go insane. / This dull life so repeats, so beats / Its tireless echo on my brain" (I, 5). The clerk's predicament is one of biological determinism wherein the physiological mechanism of consciousness runs rough-shod over the subsidiary unit of the ego: because he is acutely aware of his inability to control the way his brain works, the clerk fears that he likewise cannot actively control the course of his own existence. His awareness of his problem persists despite his willed preference to think of other matters. Thus, the problem is compounded: the mind's inability to regulate consciousness becomes an idee fixe, a cruelly self-fulfilling prophecy.

Naturalistic determinism persists throughout Aiken's early poetry, though in increasingly complex permutations after 1914." I have been feeling lately," he wrote to his friend Grayson McCouch in 1913, "that the power of the individual over his destiny has been absurdly exaggerated."¹³ Aiken's determinism was seldom synonomous with futility or despair, for he generally accepted it as a phenomenon capable of provoking individual acts of defiance or of conscious courage: the potentially debilitating implications of a mechanistic universe had to be squarely faced and rationally challenged. While neither defiant nor willful (as are other Aiken heroes), the clerk takes sufficient stock of his situation to resolve that he will alter his daily routine. In an effort to combat monotony, he decides to eat lunch at a different cafe:

—Tush, I am liverish today—
All's well tomorrow. Think I'll lunch
At some new place. I've got a "hunch"
Coffee will drive these blues away.
(I, 5)

What was taken to be an insignificant decision changes the clerk's life, for it leads directly to his discovery of the power of love. At the new cafe he orders a second helping of beans to "linger and adore" the waitress-goddess he has stumbled upon:

She was divine!—And when I left
She asked, with sweetest irony,
"All through?"—and smiled. I turned to flee,
Of every mortal sense bereft.
(I, 7)

Eros (possibly flatulently propelled) produces a salubrious state of panic: the clerk's unwholesome lethargy vanishes. Far from transforming the overly introspective clerk into a modern Werther, however, love breaks down the barriers which have helped to keep him locked in selfhood. Love refines and enlarges his vision of life; he begins to think less about himself and more about the mass of suffering humanity around him.

Aiken, like Hawthorne and James, adhered to the moral position that the artist was obligated to combat, rather than perpetuate, the propensities of so-called American "individualism." His ethical and familial heritage, in fact, was remarkably similar to James'. The moral core of James' fiction grew directly out of the Swedenborgian philosophy of Henry James, Sr., who believed that the individual "proprium" (synonomous with egotism and selfhood) must be destroyed before full, productive consciousness was possible, regardless of however horrible a "vastation" it might require. Creative consciousness—the highest human quality—had to supplant the socially engendered, moralistic conscience which, due to its inherently conformist, restrictive tendencies, prevented the individual from becoming fully aware of the reality and integrity of other lives.

Through the influence and writings of his maternal grandfather, William James Potter, Aiken inherited an ethical vision strikingly similar to that which Henry James, Jr., inherited from his father. Potter, a friend of Emerson's, moved from Quakerism to Unitarianism to a rationalistic theology. He renounced both intuitionism and ecclesiasticalism in founding the Free Religious Association in New Bedford, Massachusetts. When he moved beyond Unitarianism to "Universal Religion." his congregation moved with him. Potter passed on to his grandson a lively contempt for dogma and myth, as well as a compassionate and progressive moral sensibility.

As the clerk moves outward from his solitary boardinghouse room and becomes aware of those around him, he comes to feel a reciprocal bond between himself and his fellow boarders. Much like the relationship between Potter and his devoted congregation,¹⁴ the bond envisioned is one of candor and humility:

This nondescript gray boarding-house
Was never much to descant on:
Dirty, ill-kept, with door-knobs gone.
Moths' nests, and vestiges of mouse:
The bedding changed infrequently,
The table-cloths embossed with egg,—
All this indeed; yet now I beg
Its pardon, with humility.
For there are human beings here,
Poor beaten things—yet each a gem
Priceless to me,—because to them
I have been kind and cavalier.
Do what I will, my heart will yearn—
I bless them; and they bless, in turn.
(I, 12)

Like other writers, Aiken often used houses as cerebral or somatic metaphors (and in fact does so in the second part of The Clerk's Journal). Boardinghouses, however, were always special to him, and came to occupy an important place in his work. Boardinghouses symbolized for Aiken the essential human condition: in the transitory pilgrimage of his life man in his dependency and weakness must subjugate his willfulness to the common good. Boardinghouses represented the cooperative body politic, the social community; they were seen by Aiken as microcosmic, pluralistic metropolises which flourished in proportion to the degree of selflessness and sensitivity of their residents, who seldom could escape some degree of involvement in the lives of their contiguous neighbors.

The "fine, slum boardinghouse" Aiken lived in during the summer of 1910 also became the setting for a story. In "The Orange Moth" the young hero, Cooke, who is trying to become a writer, savors his temporary residence "in a dirty boarding-house in the great city."¹⁵ At night, freight trains, red-lighted, clank along the Death Avenue tracks. While Cooke fails in his efforts to write passages of incandescent beauty in the vein of De Quincey and Pater, his sensibility expands and he as an individual matures as a result of his spontaneous response to the teeming life around him.

Aiken was born in a Savannah boardinghouse on Whitaker Street, facing Forsyth Park. (The house today is an elegantly restored, single-family residence.) "The first really identifiable 'scene' or action" of his life took place inside the Savannah boardinghouse:

There were ladies, there were voices downstairs, at the bottom of the echoing stairwell, and they were having tea …and into this, down into this, between the dark banisters of the railing, he had released … his brother K.'s milk bottle.¹⁶

In an autobiographical sketch which parallels the Ushant account (though it changes the milk bottle from brother's to sister's), Aiken writes: " I was born in a boardinghouse, and not a particularly distinguished one. That has always seemed to me an excellent democratic antidote to my family's tradition of being in some way 'well-born.'"¹⁷ Although he was for many years essentially a-political, Aiken's inherited family liberalism rendered him a spiritual democrat, and late in life he actively supported Hubert Humphrey.¹⁸ This aspect of his temperament—so different from Pound's or Eliot's—underlay both Aiken's early appreciation of Whitman and his lifelong fascination with boardinghouses. A similar democratic progressivism and interest in multi-tenanted houses can be found in Hawthorne.

In the matter of boardinghouses we again come upon Aiken's resemblance to Henry James. Both authors as children were deeply influenced by their eccentric, restlessly inquisitive fathers, who dominated the domestic scene. Aiken remembered his father's poems, essays, medical inventions, photographical experiments, and his plans to build a boat in the back-yard. Dr. William Ford Aiken was always "the brilliant enthusiast, the passionate amateur, whose imagination flew in every direction."¹⁹ For his part, the elder Henry James could be equally energetic, equally idiosyncratic: he once spoke of God as "an immense Duck capable only of emitting an eternal quack," and suggested that if human beings were intended to be obedient to the Deity, they would "all have been born webfooted."²⁰

Aiken's interest in boardinghouses duplicated essential aspects of the elder James' radical Swedenborgianism. For instance: Swedenborg's description of heaven as a vast, collective, human metropolis caused Henry, Sr., to compare the experience of riding into London on a crowded horse-car to what he imagined heaven must be like. Writing to a friend, he grotesquely reasoned that a man of normal intelligence could not help but see that this was as close to the New Jerusalem as mortal man could hope to approach:

I can hardly flatter myself that the frankly chaotic or a-cosmical aspect of our ordinary street-car has altogether escaped your enlightened notice in your visits to the city; and it will perhaps surprise you therefore, to learn that I nevertheless continually witness so much mutual forbearance on the part of its habitues; so much spotless acquiescence under the rudest personal jostlings and inconvenience; such a cheerful renunciation of one's strict right; such an amused deference, oftentimes, to one's invasive neighbors; in short, and as a general thing, such a heavenly self-shrinkage in order that "the neighbor" handsome or unhandsome, wholesome or unwholesome, may sit or stand at ease; that I not seldom find myself inwardly exclaiming with the patriarch: How dreadful is this place! It is none other than the house of God, and the gate of heaven.²¹

His new awareness of other people enables Aiken's clerk to appreciate how will-lessness, though sometimes destructive of hope, allows his boardinghouse neighbors to practice the "mutual forbearance" which the elder James had discovered amidst the denizens of the crowded horse-car:

And up and down the stairs I mee
These poor souls born without a will,
Resigned long since to life's defeat,
Whose smiles are sunlight,—for they've lost
All thought of self, they can be kind;
They came to Lethe and they crossed,
Leaving their own souls' dreams behind.
Life's myriad, nameless souls are they—
Life's huddled, nebulous multitudes;
My heart goes out to them and broods;
How can I make these faces gay?
(I, 17)

But while his heart goes out to his fellow boarders, the clerk, anticipating the predicament of Prufrock, cannot discover an appropriate gesture to express his feelings:

Will a touch of the hand, a word, a glance,
Work my miracle?—I must try.
Could I take them all to a play, a dance!
But alas, no wonder-worker, I.
(I, 17)

The clerk's happiness ends abruptly when his adored waitress, without explanation, breaks off their relationship. Cast back into the dull round of his previous existence, he cannot resuscitate his briefly liberating joy and magnanimity. Puzzled and haunted by what he has experienced, the clerk vainly attempts to explain away his pain by positing an innate flaw in the woman he sought to love:

There was a shrewdness in her eyes—
A wizened something, old, and wise;
A dust-speck in the perfect flower,—
A minute's gray in the golden Hour.
(I, 19)

The finest lines in The Clerk's Journal emerge in the second part of the poem, where the distraught clerk struggles to comprehend and to diagnose his sorrow. Comparing his heart to a house through which he wanders, he seeks not simply consolation but, more importantly, selfknowledge:

Your heart's a house …sometimes you go
Into old rooms you scarcely know;
A mouldy cellar, webbed with grime;
Or, on a day like this, you climb
(To flee the hollowness of laughters)
Among the attic's naked rafters.
The walls are lathe-and-plaster, bare;
Old papers, boxes, dust, are there;
The broken relics of the years
Too cold and sunless grown for tears …
Turning them with a callous hand
You muse, and try to understand
What quality had that or this
To make you love.
(II, 1)

Prior to The House of Dust, where it takes on complexly vascular and neurological dimensions, the house image in Aiken's poetry was used primarily as a simple metaphor for the heart, mind, or body. In "Meditation on a June Evening," for example, in a passage which goes on to recall his childhood visits to Duxbury, Aiken writes: "It is as if I visited once more / A house I lived in once, now tenantless."²² And in "Improvisations: Lights and Snow," he describes his heart as a "forlorn old house" containing locked and secret rooms.²³ While such poets as Poe ("The Haunted Palace") and Eliot ("Gerontion") have also used house imagery in their work, it is the early use of the symbol by Frost which most closely resembles Aiken's.²⁴

Frost's "Ghost House," from A Boy's Will (1913), strikes the same emotional timbre that one finds in The Clerk's Journal, which is the " unmodern," confessional tone of the personally elegiac:

Both Aiken and Frost use the image of the house to convey a sense of loss of innocence, and to suggest that what had once been communal has now become lonely, psychologically self-enclosed. In "Ghost House," however, Frost clearly suggests that the surrounding luxuriance of nature will somehow "heal" the speaker, just as it has "healed" an old footpath; the house itself, after all, is being reabsorbed into the landscape.

Aiken's clerk does not suffer passively, but embarks (much like James' Spencer Brydon in "The Jolly Corner") upon an explorational and unpleasant "climb" of deliberate self-confrontation in an effort "to understand" himself. Analytical and bereft of much of the easy sentiment which cloys earlier passages, the second part of The Clerk's Journal describes the clerk's determination to dissect and to lay bare the concealed roots of his anguish:

A week, now—heart and soul I crave
To yield my dead up, like the grave:
To utter, word by stillborn word,
The bitter pain, though no one heard;
Out of my spirit to exhume
By wan internal candle-gloom
Shred after shred the anguish there,
Fibre by fibre smooth it bare;
And so, with curious, careful eyes,
And close-held flame, to scrutinize
This queer embodiment of pain
Till it be exorcised or slain.
(II, 3)

At the end of the poem the clerk returns to his post at the window to await the coming of spring. Although he partially relapses into the somatic prison of his "pulse's slow reverberant will," his has not been simply (as is Prufrock's) a circular, ineffectual journey. The clerk's progress, if not great, has at least been in the right direction: though returned to himself and condemned to endure the memory of a shattered harmony which reverberates "Like the scattered jargon of a child / Or voices in an ether dream" (II, 6), the clerk has taken the tentative but crucial first steps away from ignorance and egotism.

The Clerk's Journal, despite its amateurishness, bears virtually no resemblance to Aiken's juvenilia, as a comparison with his Middlesex Anvil poems makes apparent. Nor, for that matter, does it resemble his prior Harvard Advocate poems, which are so conventional as to obfuscate—were they not identified as Aiken's—heir authorship altogether. The Clerk's Journal is the first of his poems to dramatize and examine behavior modified by love and the loss of love within an essentially naturalistic framework. The poem, like all of Aiken's work, rewards close study. Much greater rewards await the reader who approaches the other early poems—today virtually unknown—without the preformed conviction that they contain neither ideas nor ethical values. To borrow a phrase from The House of Dust: Aiken's "errand," even in Earth Triumphant (1914), Turns and Movies (1916), and Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917), "is not so simple as it seems."²⁶

Notes

(I would like to thank the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund for a grant which greatly assisted me in preparing the present article.)

¹ The titles and publication dates of Aiken's early poetry are:

Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse (1914)

Turns and Movies and Other Tales in Verse (1916)

The Jig of Forslin (1916)

Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917)

The Charnel Rose; Senlin: A Biography, and Other Poems (1918)

The House of Dust (1920)

Punch: The Immortal Liar (1921)

Priapus and the Pool (1922)

The Pilgrimage of Festus (1923)

Priapus and the Pool and Other Poems (1925)

² Louis Untermeyer, Modern American Poetry, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925), pp. 488-89.

³ Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, History of American Poetry. 1900-1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company 1942), pp. 217-18.

⁴ Frederick J. Hoffman, Conrad Aiken, Twayne's United States Authors Series (New Haven: College and University Press, 1962), p. 86.

⁵ Conrad Aiken, The Clerk's Journal (New York: The Eakins Press, 1971), p. 4.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ For a superlatively documented account of Eliot's early spirituality and its place in the poetry, see Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Of "Prufrock," Gordon writes: "Despite the poem's mannered surface, Eliot is looking beyond the Jamesian scene and the obligation to cultivate human attachments—towards a characteristic theme of his own, a prophet's obligation to articulate what he alone knows" (p. 47).

⁸Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken, ed. Joseph Killorin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 19.

⁹ Conrad Aiken, Ushant (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1952), p. 71.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹Selected Letters, p. 19.

¹²The Clerk's Journal, p. 4.

¹³Selected Letters, p. 21.

¹⁴ An indication of the esteem in which Potter was held by his congregation can be found in Francis Ellingwood Abbot's "Biographical Sketch" in Potter's Lectures and Sermons.

[Potter's life] was such as to command the reverence and win the love of an ever increasing circle of those whose judgment is the judgment of the universal conscience. From the beginning to end it was the self-consecration of a pure spirit to universal aims—the devotion of large intellectual powers, great practical wisdom, a strong but never aggressive will, and shy but tender sympathies, to the highest welfare of all. To have lived such a life, in luminous contrast and superiority to the melancholy self-seeking so common among mankind, is to have won the truest and grandest success which can crown any human career.

Little as he performed the ordinary offices of the conventional 'pastor,' he yet ministered to his people in a way that held them to him with 'hooks of steel,' and rendered him their helper, comforter, and friend. How sweet and gracious and consoling were his sympathies with their sorrows, they knew, if strangers knew not; and the reluctance with which the long pastorate was at last ended tells its own story in these days of swift and frequent change.

See William J. Potter, Lectures and Sermons (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1895), pp. vi, lxxv.

¹⁵ Conrad Aiken, The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1960), p. 511.

¹⁶Ushant, pp. 35-36.

¹⁷ Conrad Aiken, "Prologue to an Autobiography," The American Scholar, 35 (Autumn 1966), 621.

¹⁸ Of his political views Aiken observed:

It was true that he had once voted for Debs, and that he had twice, too, voted for his great liberal cousin; but he had never found it possible to take more than a casual and superficial interest in practical politics, viewing it, as he did, as inevitably a passing phase, and probably a pretty primitive one, and something, again, that the evolution of consciousness would in its own good season take care of. Revolutions were a waste of time and human material;—you lost a hundred or more years only to find yourself just where you'd begun (Ushant, p. 351).

¹⁹Ushant, p. 46.

²⁰ Quoted without citation of original source by C. Hartley Grattan in The Three Jameses: A Family of Minds (New York: New York University Press, 1962), p. 79.

²¹ Ibid., pp. 79-80.

²² Conrad Aiken, Nocturne of Remembered Spring (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1917), p. 21.

²³ Conrad Aiken, Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 294.

²⁴ In terms of temperament, one would be hard-pressed to find two American poets as dissimilar as Aiken and Frost. Where Aiken was shy, private, and at times recklessly generous in giving away his own ideas and acknowledging his indebtedness to other artists. Frost was self-aggrandizing, public, and almost pathologically protective of his reputation. Yet due to remarkably similar childhood backgrounds, both poets developed into the most masculine, naturalistic, and metaphysically "dark" voices of the American poetry renaissance.

Both writers, though of New England descent, were born elsewhere: Aiken in Savannah, Frost in San Francisco. Both, due to parental deaths, returned, roughly at the same age, to spend their adolescent years in New England. Both had occasion to quit college and both married young and quickly had to support families. Both, for reasons of domestic economy, isolated themselves from the urban centers of poetic activity, and, by doing so, were able to indulge more freely their passionate love of nature (Frost on farms in England and New Hampshire, Aiken on Cape Cod and in Sussex). And, finally, both inherited radicalized versions of nineteenth century transcendentalism: Frost the mystic Swedenborgianism of his mother, Aiken the rational theology of his grandfather Potter. (Eliot, on the other hand, inherited an essentially dogmatic and formalistic Unitarianism.)

²⁵ Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), pp. 5, 6.

²⁶Collected Poems, p. 152.