The Room Summary
Conrad Aiken

Everything you need to understand or teach The Room by Conrad Aiken.

The Room Summary & Study Guide
4 Literature Criticisms
...and more

The Room Summary

Conrad Aiken's The Room, collected in John Deth and Other Poems and published in 1930, symbolically remembers and transforms Aiken's parents' deaths. It focuses on the dark and troubled struggle between chaos and order that was, for Aiken, the source of his creativity, and it proclaims his conviction (as quoted by Catharine F. Seigel in her article for Literature and Medicine) that death and birth [are] inseparably interlocked. The poem also reflects the intellectual...

(read more from the Study Guide)

Study Pack

The The Room Study Pack contains:

The Room Study Guide

Introduction

Author Biography

Plot Summary

Themes

Style

Historical Context

Critical Overview

Criticism

Critical Essay #1

Topics for Further Study

Conrad Aiken Biographies (5)

Conrad Aiken

1,165 words, approx. 4 pages

Conrad (Potter) Aiken (1889-1973), poet, essayist, novelist, and critic, was one of America's foremost men of letters and a major figure in American literary modernism.In Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, ... Read more

Conrad Aiken

10,053 words, approx. 34 pages

Biography EssayConrad 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 un... Read more

Conrad (Potter) Aiken

1,562 words, approx. 6 pages

Conrad Potter Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, the eldest of three sons born to William and Anna Aiken. His father was a brilliant Harvard-trained physician and surgeon, his mother the daughter of... Read more

Conrad (Potter) Aiken

9,570 words, approx. 32 pages

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 th... Read more

Conrad (Potter) Aiken

3,038 words, approx. 11 pages

Conrad Aiken 's works--twenty-six volumes of poetry, five novels, forty-one short stories, two volumes of criticism, and one play--present a range of achievement that made him "one of the few genuine ... Read more