Conrad Aiken and Psychoanalysis

Few living American writers can match the praise given Conrad Aiken. Aside from the more formal honors, such as the Pulitzer prize for poetry and appointment to the Chair of Poetry in the Library of Congress, there are the tributes from the critics, which encompass all areas of his work. Malcolm Cowley (1), for example, called him “the arche-typical man of letters.” Harlan Hatcher (2) credited him with the “greatest accomplishments yet made by an American in the psychological novel.” Ludwig and Poirier (3), in their recent anthology, wrote that his short stories contain “some of the best writing of the twentieth century.” Mark Schorer (4) called his autobiography, Ushant (1952), “one of the most profoundly original documents to have come out of the United States in many years, an almost stunning outpouring of prose, an incredibly subtle reconstruction of ‘the soul's landscape’.” As early as 1931, while a considerable part of Aiken's best was still unwritten, Houston Peterson devoted an entire book to a most sympathetic criticism of his work, particularly his poetry.

To be sure there have always been dissenting voices, but the man who could win such tributes must be exceptional in one way or another. Indeed Aiken's work is exceptional, some of it even unique. His distinctive qualities arise, very largely, from his interest in psychoanalysis, which appeared prominently in his early work and has remained in his writings ever since. It is in his criticism, his poems, bis novels, his short stories, and in his autobiography—an important part of his best work as well as of his worst.

It appears very clearly in his early Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry, published in 1919. “Poetry,” he says there, “like the dream, is an outcome of suppression, a release of complexes” (5). During poetic composition there is not only a heightened consciousness, but “the many passages which lead downward to the subconscious are thrown open, and the communications between the two planes