SOURCE: "The Poetry of Conrad Aiken," in Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts, The University of Georgia Press, 1948, pp. 195-207.

In the following essay, Brown discusses the musical techniques that Aiken used in his early poetry and remarks that unlike many other poets who claim to rely on music, Aiken does so extensively and accurately.

Probably no poet has been more concerned with music than Conrad Aiken, or has used it more fruitfully. The interest is visible even in the titles of his poems, where we find nocturnes, tone-poems, variations, dissonants, and symphonies. He describes himself as groping for musical effects from the beginning of his poetic career, and though he has tended to become more metaphysical during the past decade, the influence can still be seen in even such traditional and fixed types as his sonnet sequence, and, to a lesser extent, the Brownstone Eclogues...