Conrad Aiken Biography

Encyclopedia of World Biography on Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken's long and productive literary career has prompted such descriptions of him as "the buried giant of twentieth-century American writing" (Malcolm Cowley), "the best known unread poet of the twentieth century" (Louis Untermeyer), and appreciations such as "When the tide of aesthetic sterility which is slowly engulfing us has withdrawn, our first great poet will be left. Perhaps he [Aiken] is the man" (William Faulkner). Hayden Carruth has suggested that Aiken's influence had significant impact "in determining, almost while no one was aware of it, the look and sound of the poetry written in our age." While no consensus has been reached, Aiken's thirty volumes of poetry, five novels, dozens of short stories, hundreds of critical articles and reviews, and his autobiography, plus collected and selected editions of poetry, short stories, novels, and criticism, constitute a major and imposing body of work. Translations have appeared in fifteen languages, and adaptations or readings of his work have been presented on radio or television on seventy different occasions between 1936 and 1971, in the United States, Canada, England, and Germany.

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