Aiken, Conrad
(Savannah, Ga. 1889-1973 Savannah) : Schriftsteller, Dichter, Dramatiker
Name Alternative(s)
Aiken, Conrad Potter
Subjects
Index of Names : Occident
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Literature : Occident : United States of America
Chronology Entries (3)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1920 |
Aiken, Conrad. Body and raiment, and Profiles from China by Eunice Tietjens : review [ID D32393]. Of Profiles from China there is more to be said [than Body and raiment] : one may argue pro and con as to whether it belongs more suitably or more profitably in the category of prose or poetry ; and one has to deal, however that question is argued, with vignettes sufficiently sharp, with artistic effects which are tantalizingly of a dubiousness. For what one gets back to ultimately in the case of Mrs. Tietjens is the lack of any very marked idiosyncracy of sensibility. This lack must have been present from the outset, and it is one which she will find it difficult if not impossible to overcome. One by no means implies, in taking this position, that she lacks talent : we are involved, indeed, simply in drawing what is at best a very dubious line between talen and genius. Of talent it is evident that Mrs. Tietjens has a great deal. Her sense of rhytm is firm, rich, varied, and is combined with a well-developed sense of orotundity, the sense of sound-values as distinct from rhythm-values. In this regard her work compares very faborably with that done by any other woman now writing verse in America. But this, unfortunately, is insufficient : one demands more ; one demands just that so slight amount of difference, just that personal variation on the skillful norm, which sets the true artist apart. This Mrs. Tietjens lacks, when one examines her work closely, in rhythm, and even more conspicuously in other regards. What is it that her sensibility has given her to say, what is it that her frustrations have compelled her to say ? Nothing – one confesses reluctantly – very unique. The perceptions are good, normal, sometimes charming, but never very acute ; the moods are recognizable, but never rich. And all this is tantamount to saying that Mrs. Tietjens seldom gets very far from a skillful rhythmical treatment of the sentimental in terms of the commonplace. |
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| 2 | 1929 |
Ye Gongchao. [Review essay] Aiken, Conrad. American poetry, 1671-1928. (New York, N.Y. : The Modern Library, 1929). In ; Xin yue ; vol. 2, no 2 (April 1929). Ye reports that Aiken foregrounded Emily Dickinson in his anthology by including twenty-four poems of hers. He reiterates Aiken's view that Dickinson's work functioned as a landmark indicative of the increasing quality of American poetry. If Dickinson was a strange name to the target audience of Ye's essay, and evidently this was the case, Ye would have had a responsibility of say more about her. |
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| 3 | 1955 |
Aiken, Conrad. A letter from Li Po [ID D30880]. I Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind announces autumn, and the equinox rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon. Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone, looking for friendship or an old love's sleeve or writing letters to his children, lost, and to his children's children, and to us. What was his light? of lamp or moon or sun? Say that it changed, for better or for worse, sifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk a slant of witch-light; on the pure text a slant of genius; emptying mind and heart for winecups and more winecups and more words. What was his time? Say that it was a change, but constant as a changing thing may be, from chicory's moon-dark blue down the taut scale to chicory's tenderest pink, in a pink field such as imagination dreams of thought. But of the heart beneath the winecup moon the tears that fell beneath the winecup moon for children lost, lost lovers, and lost friends, what can we say but that it never ends? Even for us it never ends, only begins. Yet to spell down the poem on her page, margining her phrases, parsing forth the sevenfold prism of meaning, up the scale from chicory pink to blue, is to assume Li Po himself: as he before assumed the poets and the sages who were his. Like him, we too have eaten of the word: with him are somewhere lost beyond the Gorge: and write, in rain, a letter to lost children, a letter long as time and brief as love. II And yet not love, not only love. Not caritas or only that. Nor the pink chicory love, deep as it may be, even to moon-dark blue, in which the dragon of his meaning flew for friends or children lost, or even for the beloved horse, for Li Po's horse: not these, in the self's circle so embraced: too near, too dear, for pure assessment: no, a letter crammed and creviced, crannied full, storied and stored as the ripe honeycomb with other faith than this. As of sole pride and holy loneliness, the intrinsic face worn by the always changing shape between end and beginning, birth and death. How moves that line of daring on the map? Where was it yesterday, or where this morning when thunder struck at seven, and in the bay the meteor made its dive, and shed its wings, and with them one more Icarus? Where struck that lightning-stroke which in your sleep you saw wrinkling across the eyelid? Somewhere else? But somewhere else is always here and now. Each moment crawls that lightning on your eyelid: each moment you must die. It was a tree that this time died for you: it was a rock and with it all its local web of love: a chimney, spilling down historic bricks: perhaps a skyful of Ben Franklin's kites. And with them, us. For we must hear and bear the news from everywhere: the hourly news, infinitesimal or vast, from everywhere. III Sole pride and loneliness: it is the state the kingdom rather of all things: we hear news of the heart in weather of the Bear, slide down the rungs of Cassiopeia's Chair, still on the nursery floor, the Milky Way; and, if we question one, must question all. What is this ‘man'? How far from him is ‘me'? Who, in this conch-shell, locked the sound of sea? We are the tree, yet sit beneath the tree, among the leaves we are the hidden bird, we are the singer and are what is heard. What is this ‘world'? Not Li Po's Gorge alone, and yet, this too might be. ‘The wind was high north of the White King City, by the fields of whistling barley under cuckoo sky,' where, as the silkworm drew her silk, Li Po spun out his thoughts of us. ‘Endless as silk' (he said) ‘these poems for lost loves, and us,' and, ‘for the peachtree, blooming in the ditch.' Here is the divine loneliness in which we greet, only to doubt, a voice, a word, the smoke of a sweetfern after frost, a face touched, and loved, but still unknown, and then a body, still mysterious in embrace. Taste lost as touch is lost, only to leave dust on the doorsill or an ink-stained sleeve: and yet, for the inadmissible, to grieve. Of leaf and love, at last, only to doubt: from world within or world without, kept out. IV Caucus of robins on an alien shore as of the Ho-Ho birds at Jewel Gate southward bound and who knows where and never late or lost in a roar at sea. Rovers of chaos each one the ‘Rover of Chao,' whose slight bones shall put to shame the swords. We fly with these, have always flown, and they stay with us here, stand still and stay, while, exiled in the Land of Pa, Li Po still at the Wine Spring stoops to drink the moon. And northward now, for fall gives way to spring, from Sandy Hook and Kitty Hawk they wing, and he remembers, with the pipes and flutes, drunk with joy, bewildered by the chance that brought a friend, and friendship, how, in vain, he strove to speak, ‘and in long sentences,' his pain. Exiled are we. Were exiles born. The ‘far away,' language of desert, language of ocean, language of sky, as of the unfathomable worlds that lie between the apple and the eye, these are the only words we learn to say. Each morning we devour the unknown. Each day we find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose, a sunflower splendor of which none knows the source. This cornucopia of air! This very heaven of simple day! We do not know, can never know, the alphabet to find us entrance there. So, in the street, we stand and stare, to greet a friend, and shake his hand, yet know him beyond knowledge, like ourselves; ocean unknowable by unknowable sand. V The locust tree spills sequins of pale gold in spiral nebulae, borne on the Invisible earthward and deathward, but in change to find the cycles to new birth, new life. Li Po allowed his autumn thoughts like these to flow, and, from the Gorge, sends word of Chouang's dream. Did Chouang dream he was a butterfly? Or did the butterfly dream Chouang? If so, why then all things can change, and change again, the sea to brook, the brook to sea, and we from man to butterfly; and back to man. This 'I,' this moving ‘I,' this focal ‘I,' which changes, when it dreams the butterfly, into the thing it dreams of; liquid eye in which the thing takes shape, but from within as well as from without: this liquid ‘I': how many guises, and disguises, this nimblest of actors takes, how many names puts on and off, the costumes worn but once, the player queen, the lover, or the dunce, hero or poet, father or friend, suiting the eloquence to the moment's end; childlike, or bestial; the language of the kiss sensual or simple; and the gestures, too, as slight as that with which an empire falls, or a great love's abjured; these feignings, sleights, savants, or saints, or fly-by-nights, the novice in her cell, or wearing tights on the high wire above a hell of lights: what's true in these, or false? which is the ‘I' of 'I's'? Is it the master of the cadence, who transforms all things to a hoop of flame, where through tigers of meaning leap? And are these true, the language never old and never new, such as the world wears on its wedding day, the something borrowed with something chicory blue? In every part we play, we play ourselves; even the secret doubt to which we come beneath the changing shapes of self and thing, yes, even this, at last, if we should call and dare to name it, we would find the only voice that answers is our own. We are once more defrauded by the mind. Defrauded? No. It is the alchemy by which we grow. It is the self becoming word, the word becoming world. And with each part we play we add to cosmic Sum and cosmic sum. Who knows but one day we shall find, hidden in the prism at the rainbow's foot, the square root of the eccentric absolute, and the concentric absolute to come. VI The thousand eyes, the Argus ‘I's' of love, of these it was, in verse, that Li Po wove the magic cloak for his last going forth, into the Gorge for his adventure north. What is not seen or said? The cloak of words loves all, says all, sends back the word whether from Green Spring, and the yellow bird 'that sings unceasing on the banks of Kiang,' or 'from the Green Moss Path, that winds and winds, nine turns for every hundred steps it winds, up the Sword Parapet on the road to Shuh.' ‘Dead pinetrees hang head-foremost from the cliff. The cataract roars downward. Boulders fall Splitting the echoes from the mountain wall. No voice, save when the nameless birds complain, in stunted trees, female echoing male; or, in the moonlight, the lost cuckoo's cry, piercing the traveller's heart. Wayfarer from afar, why are you here? what brings you here? why here?' VII Why here. Nor can we say why here. The peachtree bough scrapes on the wall at midnight, the west wind sculptures the wall of fog that slides seaward, over the Gulf Stream. The rat comes through the wainscot, brings to his larder the twinned acorn and chestnut burr. Our sleep lights for a moment into dream, the eyes turn under eyelids for a scene, a scene, o and the music, too, of landscape lost. And yet, not lost. For here savannahs wave cressets of pampas, and the kingfisher binds all that gold with blue. Why here? why here? Why does the dream keep only this, just this C? Yes, as the poem or the music do? The timelessness of time takes form in rhyme: the lotus and the locust tree rehearse a four-form song, the quatrain of the year: not in the clock's chime only do we hear the passing of the Now into the past, the passing into future of the Now: hut in the alteration of the bough time becomes visible, becomes audible, becomes the poem and the music too: time becomes still, time becomes time, in rhyme. Thus, in the Court of Aloes, Lady Yang called the musicians from the Pear Tree Garden, called for Li Po, in order that the spring, tree-peony spring, might so be made immortal. Li Po, brought drunk to court, took up his brush, but washed his face among the lilies first, then wrote the song of Lady Flying Swallow: which Hsuang Sung, the emperor, forthwith played, moving quick fingers on a flute of jade. Who will forget that afternoon? Still, still, the singer holds his phrase, the rising moon remains unrisen. Even the fountain's falling blade hangs in the air unbroken, and says: Wait! VIII Text into text, text out of text. Pretext for scholars or for scholiasts. The living word springs from the dying, as leaves in spring spring from dead leaves, our birth from death. And all is text, is holy text. Sheepfold Hill becomes its name for us, anti yet is still unnamed, unnamable, a book of trees before it was a book for men or sheep, before it was a book for words. Words, words, for it is scarlet now, and brown, and red, and yellow where the birches have not shed, where, in another week, the rocks will show. And in this marriage of text and thing how can we know where most the meaning lies? We climb the hill through bullbriar thicket and the wild rose, climb past poverty-grass and the sweet-scented bay scaring the pheasant from his wall, but can we say that it is only these, through these, we climb, or through the words, the cadence, and the rhyme? Chang Hsu, calligrapher of great renown, needed to put but his three cupfuls down to tip his brush with lightning. On the scroll, wreaths of cloud rolled left and right, the sky opened upon Forever. Which is which? The poem? Or the peachtree in the ditch? Or is all one? Yes, all is text, the immortal text, Sheepfold Hill the poem, the poem Sheepfold Hill, and we, Li Po, the man who sings, sings as he climbs, transposing rhymes to rocks and rocks to rhymes. The man who sings. What is this man who sings? And finds this dedicated use for breath for phrase and periphrase of praise between the twin indignities of birth and death? Li Yung, the master of the epitaph, forgetting about meaning, who himself had added 'meaning' to the book of >things,' lies who knows where, himself sans epitaph, his text, too, lost, forever lost ... And yet, no, text lost and poet lost, these only flow into that other text that knows no year. The peachtree in the poem is still here. The song is in the peachtree and the ear. IX The winds of doctrine blow both ways at once. The wetted finger feels the wind each way, presaging plums from north, and snow from south. The dust-wind whistles from the eastern sea to dry the nectarine and parch the mouth. The west wind from the desert wreathes the rain too late to fill our wells, but soon enough, the four-day rain that bears the leaves away. Song with the wind will change, but is still song and pierces to the rightness in the wrong or makes the wrong a rightness, a delight. Where are the eager guests that yesterday thronged at the gate? Like leaves, they could not stay, the winds of doctrine blew their minds away, and we shall have no loving-cup tonight. No loving-cup: for not ourselves are here to entertain us in that outer year, where, so they say, we see the Greater Earth. The winds of doctrine blow our minds away, and we are absent till another birth. X Beyond the Sugar Loaf, in the far wood, under the four-day rain, gunshot is heard and with the falling leaf the falling bird flutters her crimson at the huntsman's foot. Life looks down at death, death looks up at life, the eyes exchange the secret under rain, rain all the way from heaven: and all three know and are known, share and are shared, a silent moment of union and communion. Have we come this way before, and at some other time? Is it the Wind Wheel Circle we have come? We know the eye of death, and in it too the eye of god, that closes as in sleep, giving its light, giving its life, away: clouding itself as consciousness from pain, clouding itself, and then, the shutter shut. And will this eye of god awake again? Or is this what he loses, loses once, but always loses, and forever lost? It is the always and unredeemable cost of his invention, his fatigue. The eye closes, and no other takes its place. It is the end of god, each time, each time. Yet, though the leaves must fall, the galaxies rattle, detach, and fall, each to his own perplexed and individual death, Lady Yang gone with the inkberry's vermilion stalk, the peony face behind a fan of frost, the blue-moon eyebrow behind a fan of rain, beyond recall by any alchemist or incantation from the Book of Change: unresumable, as, on Sheepfold Hill, the fir cone of a thousand years ago: still, in the loving, and the saying so, as when we name the hill, and, with the name, bestow an essence, and a meaning, too: do we endow them with our lives? They move into another orbit: into a time not theirs: and we become the bell to speak this time: as we become new eyes with which they see, the voice in which they find duration, short or long, the chthonic and hermetic song. Beyond Sheepfold Hill, gunshot again, the bird flies forth to meet predestined death, to look with conscious sight into the eye of light the light unflinching that understands and loves. And Sheepfold Hill accepts them, and is still. XI The landscape and the language are the same. And we ourselves are language and are land, together grew with Sheepfold Hill, rock, and hand, and mind, all taking substance in a thought wrought out of mystery: birdflight and air predestined from the first to be a pair: as, in the atom, the living rhyme invented her divisions, which in time, and in the terms of time, would make and break the text, the texture, and then all remake. This powerful mind that can by thinking take the order of the world and all remake, will it, for joy in breaking, break instead its own deep thought that thought itself be dead? Already in our coil of rock and hand, hidden in the cloud of mind, burning, fading, under the waters, in the eyes of sand, was that which in its time would understand. Already in the Kingdom of the Dead the scrolls were waiting for the names and dates and what would there irrevocably be said. The brush was in the hand, the poem was in the love, the praise was in the word. The ‘Book of Lives' listed the name, Li Po, as an Immortal; and it was time to travel. Not, this year, north to the Damask City, or the Gorge, but, by the phoenix borne, swift as the wind, to the Jade Palace Portal. There look through the clouded to the clear and there watch evil like a brush-stroke disappear in the last perfect rhyme of the begin-all-end-all poem, time. XII Northwest by north. The grasshopper weathervane bares to the moon his golden breastplate, swings in his predicted circle, gilded legs and wings bright with frost, predicting frost. The tide scales with moon-silver, floods the marsh, fulfils Payne Creek and Quivett Creek, rises to lift the fishing-boats against a jetty wall; and past them floods the plankton and the weed and limp sea-lettuce for the horseshoe crab who sleeps till daybreak in his nest of reed. The hour is open as the mind is open. Closed as the mind is closed. Opens as the hand opens to receive the ghostly snowflakes of the moon, closes to feel the sunbeams of the bloodstream warm our human inheritance of touch. The air tonight brings back, to the all-remembering world, its ghosts, borne from the Great Year on the Wind Wheel Circle. On that invisible wave we lift, we too, and drag at secret moorings, stirred by the ancient currents that gave us birth. And they are here, Li Po and all the others, our fathers and our mothers: the dead leaf's footstep touches the grass: those who were lost at sea and those the innocents the too-soon dead: all mankind and all it ever knew is here in-gathered, held in our hands, and in the wind breathed by the pines on Sheepfold Hill. How still the Quaker Graveyard, the Meeting House how still, where Cousin Abiel, on a night like this, now long since dead, but then how young, how young, scuffing among the dead leaves after frost looked up and saw the Wine Star, listened and heard borne from all quarters the Wind Wheel Circle word: the father within him, the mother within him, the self coming to self through love of each for each. In this small mute democracy of stones is it Abiel or Li Po who lies and lends us against death our speech? They are the same, and it is both who teach. The poets and the prophecies are ours: and these are with us as we turn, in turn, the leaves of love that fill the Book of Change. |
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Bibliography (3)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1920 |
Aiken, Conrad. Body and raiment, and Profiles from China by Eunice Tietjens : review. In : Poetry ; vol. 15, no 5 (Febr. 1920). http://www.jstor.org/stable/20572458. |
Publication / Tiet5 | |
| 2 | 1949 |
Xian dai Meiguo shi ge. Aigen [Conrad Potter Aiken] ; Yuan Shuipai yi. (Shanghai : Chen guang chu ban gong si, 1949). (Chen guang shi jie wen xue cong shu). Übersetzung von American poetry : 1671-1928 : a comprehensive anthology. Ed. by Conrad Aiken. (New York, N.Y. : Modern Library, 1929). [Enthält Walt Whitman]. 現代美國詩歌 |
Publication / YuaS1 | |
| 3 | 1955 |
Aiken, Conrad. A letter from Li Po. In : Chicago review ; vol. 9, no 1 (Spring 1955). http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/conrad_aiken/poems/331. |
Publication / Aik1 |
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