SOURCE: "Aiken's Preludes: Starting Fresh," in Essays in Arts and Sciences, Vol. XVIII, May, 1989, pp. 53-84.

In the following essay, Story attempts to provide new insight into the themes, structure, and rhythms of Aiken's Preludes for Memnon, arguing that previously, Aiken's poems have been analyzed not in their own right but almost exclusively from the point of view of his parent's violent deaths.

A contextualist approach to Conrad Aiken's poetry encounters two obstacles. First is the challenge of identifying his best poems amid the incredible volume of his publications. Second is the distraction of his well known childhood tragedy of parental murder-suicide. With few exceptions,¹ contextualist critics ignore Aiken's work whereas scholars concentrating on the biographical and psychological have produced an abundance of scholarship on the artist and his art. What is called for now is fresh, contextual analysis of Aiken's poetry to complement the wealth of more...