Poetry for Students

The Room

Conrad Aiken’s “The Room,” collected in John

Deth and Other Poemsand published in 1930, sym-

bolically remembers and transforms Aiken’s par-

ents’ 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 currents of its time. It

presents aspects of psychological phenomena de-

scribed in Freudian literature, like repression and

displacement, and it uses mythic, or archetypal, im-

agery and a theory of recurrent cycles like those

that were explored by the Swiss psychologist Carl

Jung. Aiken represents emotional states and psy-

chic phenomena using images that suggest those

states. “The Room” is available in Aiken’s Col-

lected Poems(1953; 2nd ed., 1970), published by

Oxford University Press.

Author Biography

Conrad Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, on

August 5, 1889, the eldest of four children. When

Aiken was eleven, his father, a physician and a

poet, murdered his wife and then turned the pistol

on himself. Seeing the blood-soaked bodies, Aiken

went to the police station for help. After their par-

ents’ burial, the children were separated. Aiken was

Conrad Aiken

1930

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