American novelist and poet (1889-1973)
It has been said that all the arts are constantly attempting, within their respective spheres, to attain to something of the quality of music, to assume, whether in pigment, or pencil, or marble, or prose, something of its speed and flash, emotional completeness, and well-harmonied resonance; but of no other single art is that so characteristically or persistently true as it is of poetry. Poetry is indeed in this regard two-natured: it strikes us, when it is at its best, quite as sharply through our sense of the musically beautiful as through whatever implications it has to carry of thought or feeling: it plays on us alternately or simultaneously through sound as well as through sense.
CONRAD AIKEN
Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry
It is entirely natural that the poet, if he command a decent prose style, or is accustomed to the exactions of speech-making, should set about hunting converts. What he is going to say is largely predetermined. It will be, as it were, a slow distillation of his temperament through his reason. There will be moments of uncertainty at the outset, moments when his temperament goes too fast for him, and is not properly alembricated. At such moments his dicta will have a little too much, as he perceives later, the air of personal tastes and whims, and not sufficiently the carved serenity of, let us say, a poetic decalogue. But with time he achieves this stony solidity: his pronouncements increase in massiveness and weight. And many a young head is crushed beneath them.
CONRAD AIKEN
Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry
Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain! I am dissolved and woven again... Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me. Thousands of voices weave in the rain.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
You know, without my telling you, how sometimes a word or name eludes you, and you seek it through running ghosts of shadow -- leaping at it, lying in wait for it to spring upon it, spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, you hear it, see it flash among the branches, and scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
The real thing, this! and all these endless days, these days of senseless drudgery, it was this that set his soul in fever -- in a craze -- to break away, to feel the crushing bliss of life that wars with life -- the seethe and hiss.
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth"
Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.
CONRAD AIKEN
interview, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1968
I love you, what star do you live on?
CONRAD AIKEN
Chance Meetings
No god save self, that is the way to live ...
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth"
My heart has become as hard as a city street, the horses trample upon it, it sings like iron, all day long and all night long they beat, they ring like the hooves of time.
CONRAD AIKEN
Discordants
Here too was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at least must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that -- the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death.
CONRAD AIKEN
"Mr. Arcularus"
The truth--a hideous spectacle!
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth Penetrant"
I can remember discussing the effect of the typewriter on our work with Tom Eliot because he was moving to the typewriter about the same time I was. And I remember our agreeing that it made for a slight change of style in the prose -- that you tended to use more periodic sentences, a little shorter, and a rather choppier style -- and that one must be careful about that. Because, you see, you couldn't look ahead quite far enough, for you were always thinking about putting your fingers on the bloody keys. But that was a passing phase only. We both soon discovered that we were just as free to let the style throw itself into the air as we had been writing manually.
CONRAD AIKEN
interview, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1968
We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
I walk in a cloud of wonder; I am glad. I mingle among the crowds; my heart is pounding; you do not guess the adventure I have had!... Yet you, too, all have had your dark adventures, your sudden adventures, or strange, or sweet.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
One skeleton-leaf, white-ribbed, a last year's leaf,
Skipped in a paltry gust, whizzed from the dust,
Leapt the small dusty puddle; and sailing then
Merrily in the sunlight, lodged itself
Between two blossoms in a hawthorn tree.
That was the moment: and the world was changed.
With that insane gay skeleton of a leaf
A world of dead worlds flew to hawthorn trees,
Lodged in the green forks, rattled, rattled their ribs
(As loudly as a dead leaf's ribs can rattle)
Blithely, among bees and blossoms. I cursed,
I shook my stick, dislodged it. To what end?
Its ribs, and all the ribs of all dead worlds,
Would house them now forever as death should:
Cheek by jowl with May.
CONRAD AIKEN
"Dead Leaf in May"
The days, the nights, flow one by one above us. The hours go silently over our lifted faces. We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea. Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together. We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh! When we are dead, my best beloved and I, close well above us, that we may rest forever, sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.
CONRAD AIKEN
Discordants
The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams, the eternal asker of answers, stands in the street, and lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
Naked then my soul shall feel primal darkness softly steal closer, closer, all about, blotting all the light of living out.
CONRAD AIKEN
Blue Voyage
I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort--I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form--all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do.
CONRAD AIKEN
interview, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1968