SOURCE: "Antennae of the Race: Conrad Aiken's Poetry and the Evolution of Consciousness," in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 215-26.

In the following essay, Hagenbüchle asserts that the focus of Aiken's poetry is the relationship between the individual and the world and the difficulty of expressing that relationship.

"Surely the basis of all poetic activity, its sine qua non, its very essence, lies in the individual's ability, and need, to isolate for feeling and contemplation the relation 'I:World.' That, in fact, is the begin-all-end-all business of the poet's life."¹ This sentence contains the gist of Aiken's poetics. The poet sees himself as observer whose object of investigation is the nature and meaning of the human experience. What intrigued Akien throughout his life was the fact that all such investigation implies a threefold difficulty: first, the examination of any object calls for an artificial...