Conrad Aiken

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In Earth Triumphant, Conrad Aiken's first major book of poetry, he took on a significant subject: What is the ultimate source of the human spirit? When the young human spirit loves, rages, strives, plays, where does that energy come from? When the old...

Earth Triumphant

Earth Triumphant

In Charnel Rose, Conrad Aiken takes the plunge into a deeply metaphysical and surrealistic world, capturing the essence of one aspect of quintessential humanity: how we create and pursue a deeply personal, intensely idealistic, physically and...

Nocturne of Remembered Spring

Nocturne of Remembered Spring

What Spoon River Anthology does for a Midwestern small town, Turns and Movies does for the world of vaudeville. Like Masters, like Aiken: passions, betrayals, secrets, sins, victories, defeats, and inevitable losing struggles against age and death are...

Nocturne of Remembered Spring, and Other Poems

Nocturne of Remembered Spring, and Other Poems

Written at the height of the Great War, the poems of this volume are suffused with a sense of melancholy and tragedy. Some of the poems (such as "1915: The Trenches") speak directly of war-time scenes and images, but even those which don't do so are...

The House of Dust: A Symphony

The House of Dust: A Symphony

The House of Dust is a poem written in the four-movement format of a classical symphony. Hauntingly beautiful despite its bleak post-World War I depictions of human mortality and loss, the poem develops its movements around central images such as...

Turns and Movies

Turns and Movies

Conrad Aiken was fascinated throughout his early work with the image of a tempestuous, romantic young man who tears himself away from his wife, his first love, and from a pastoral, peaceful life in a rural setting, to pursue what he hopes will be a...