A Poet of the Sum
SHAPIRO, HARVEY
A Poet of the Sum Collected Poems. By Conrad Aiken. Oxford. 895 pp. $10.50. Reviewed by Harvey Shapiro Author of a forthcoming book of poems, "The Eye"; contributor to "Poetry" Conrad Aiken's...
...Hi*- imagery is rarely concrete...
...Gary Cooper and Herman Melville...
...The Westerner with his lariat looped in a paradox...
...your note is nothing: the sum is everything...
...The poem begins by addressing William Blackstone, whom Aiken cites as "the true prototypical American...
...In this monologue of mind, in this search among shifting identities, the poet has found for himself a sure music: "'You...
...contributor to "Poetry" Conrad Aiken's book points up the richness of American poetry during the last two decades...
...It has, for its serious purpose, an examination of man in the figure of the soldier...
...What results is never a poetrv of naming, but a poetry of false surfaces, of deceptions that build, somehow, a credible universe...
...Aiken's volume, chronologically arranged, begins with the title poem from his second volume...
...The clouds above him and the breakers below blazed with glory, and the Kid also...
...So the book begins with "Turns and Movies" and concludes with his last long poems, "The Soldier" and "The Kid...
...And softly under the four-voiced dialogue, In the bright ether, in the golden river Of cabbalistic sound, I plunged, I found The silver rind of peace, the hollow round Carved out of nothing: curled there like a god...
...The poet's intention here is to construct the mythical American...
...Nothing of his first book is included because, as the poet states, "nothing was there considered to be even remotely salvageable...
...That he is a poet of the sum as against the single note, Aiken is fully aware: "Not with the noting of a private hate, as if one put a mark down in a book...
...The character's name sometimes keys the reflective stream...
...This last circumstance, more than any other, has been responsible for his neglect...
...from fine belief, as almost makes the dead man rise again—praise him...
...nor the observing of peculiar light, ringed round with what refractions peace can bring-give it up, phrase-maker...
...doughboy, dogface, (solidus, a piece of silver, the soldier's pay), marine or tommy, god's mercenary . . . ." The poem adds up to only a borrowed glory, the poet trying to take for himself, with no real claim, the battle honors of the soldier...
...fools, follow him...
...It breezes along so quickly that it does no more than outline its subject...
...so "Senlin" means "a little old man...
...it is too pleased with its effects...
...The basic strategy of the poems is similar: The poet establishes a mind through which we are permitted to view a marvelously refracted world...
...Who saw the Kid then he rose from the east riding the bridled and fire-bright Beast...
...then the theatrical takes over...
...These are all poems of the mind's music, the mind musing upon the world, a series of radiant "image streams" with only the softest directions, all placed in an impeccable sound and movement...
...Who saw that hero, that pinto, come like an indivisible Word from foam...
...Among these are "The Charnel Rose," "The Jig of Forslin," "The House of Dust," "Senlin: A Biography," "The Pilgrimage of Festus," "Changing Mind," "Preludes for Memnon," "Time in the Rock...
...The Kid," the final poem, is certainly more serious in intent, though it is written in a kind of mixed doggerel and ballad form...
...His first poetry and his last, as represented in this book, are the weakest portions of his work, and for similar reasons...
...He was, as Aiken's notes tell us, a solitary, bookish man, the first settler in Boston, who moved on into the wilderness to escape an encroaching civilization...
...Things are so washed by the mind's sensations of them that they lose their edges, but gain instead a music and an emotional tone...
...It has been difficult to see Aiken's work clearly because it runs counter to so much of the best poetry being written today...
...Narcissus!' I said...
...his instances are not local...
...Out of these figures, and against the landscape of the West, the American emerges ?an intellectual Billy the Kid, with a solitary mind intent on inhuman mysteries...
...The world is seen as under water...
...The sentimentality invades the language, and so it seems to do in the very latest work...
...When the poet tries to stir up a specific horror—and this is more often the case in the early poems than in the later ones — his poems become weak, their energy departs them as if they were working from a false source...
...The poem also considers Anne Bradstreet, James Audubon, Henry Thoreau, John Jay Chapman, Kit Carson, Herman Melville, Willard Gibbs, Henry Adams, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson...
...Although Aiken's poetry appears in most of the anthologies of modern verse, it is rarely considered of major importance...
...yet, this volume of close to 900 pages, the achievement of forty years, contains much of excellence...
...The mind, or character, is rarely important, though he may have a story to tell...
...Here is some of it for the tone: "Consider soldier, whatever name you go by...
...They are weakened by a theatricalism that, though it appears even in the best of his work, is there kept in careful check...
...and it reminds us as well that, despite the excellent criticism that has grown from and for this body of work, final estimates of it remain to be made...
...Turns and Movies," for example, consists of a series of tabloid poems — clever, bright presentations of stories of unhappy loves, but all marred by the poet's excessive identification with the sentimental story he presents...
...The Soldier," with some overtones of Ezra Pound, is a historical glorification of war and soldiering...
...In these poems, Aiken, like the Ancient Mariner, fixes us for the long journey over water...
...As to the final statement of this poetry, its major intent, here it is presented to us in Aiken's picture of his own poetic stance: "he, who of bitterness makes the healing word, sells crucifixes to the crucified, or crucifixions to the not yet dead...
...The poems upon which Aiken's future reputation will surely rest are the long, questioning, exploratory poems that make up the body of the book...
...for he goes by the bright path that only godhead knows: cross his palm with silver, for he will give gaily, out of his heart (for that is he), the one thing the heart needs, the need to live...
...claps on his mask, laughs out of terror, sings like a bird in the thunderbolt itself— nimble comer and goer, haunter of crypts and cells, quicksilver heels, who tells his lies for love, reads you your fortune in the thistledown and draws such magic out...
...Hear him shout from the surf-gold, streaming crupper and bit, the surcingle gleaming, elbows sharp against daybreak sky...
...The long poem is again in fashion (witness the latest work of Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate), and our criticism, so sharp in its viewing of the metaphoric nexus, begins to enlarge its sights...
...But the current is beginning to shift...
...The center of each poem appears to be an unnamed dread that keeps the music spinning about it but never exposes itself...
...Each poem appears to grow by this energy of protection, as if the source were constantly hiding itself in its own disclosures...
...Then Aiken begins to furnish his work with vampires and tales of suicide...
...his long poems (which comprise his best work) demand to be considered as long poems and not as a series of brilliant passages, and this our criticism has not been geared to do...
...He was, symbolically, a writer whose book is lost...
...In spite of its many exciting passages and its attractive theme, the poem fails to satisfy...
...nor with the chronicling of a private love, as if one cut a vein and let it bleed...
...The terror, like the beauty in his work, is best when it is accumulative...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 1
