SOURCE: "Conrad Aiken: Our Best Known Unread Poet," in Saturday Review (New York), Vol. 50, No. 47, November 25, 1967, pp. 28-9, 76-7.

In the following essay, Untermeyer reviews Aiken's prolific career as a poet and observes that his work rarely provokes anything other than strong feelings, whether positive or negative, from its readers.

The case of Conrad Aiken is as singular as it is confusing. Practically no criticism of his work has struck anything like a balance. The great quantity of his writing and its stubbornly idiosyncratic quality combine to preclude a tempered estimate. He has been condemned for an all-too-ready rhetoric and he has been exalted for a superb command of the poetic art.

One of the most prolific and definitely the most versatile of poets, Aiken, at the age of seventy-eight, has published twenty-seven volumes of poetry, five novels, five collections of short stories, two books of criticism, three...