Volume 24 239
complete competence.” Yet Aiken is more esteemed
by poets and critics than he is popular among read-
ers. As Seigel says, Louis Untermeyer wrote an ar-
ticle in the Saturday Reviewin 1967 titled “Conrad
Aiken: Our Best Known Unread Poet.” Fifteen years
before that, Seigel also says, the critic Mark Schorer,
writing in the Nation, called the critical neglect of
Aiken’s work “a conspiracy of silence.”
Perhaps the main reason for this is that Aiken
has been out of step with one of the fundamental
aesthetic principles that governed poetry in the
twentieth century, as formulated by T. S. Eliot in
his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
“The progress of an artist is a continual self-
sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” All
of Aiken’s work, quite to the contrary, is a contin-
uous, even obsessive, combing through and ex-
ploitation of the harrowing primal events of his life.
He constantly attempts to find universals in his own
particulars and to transform his personal trauma
into literature. Yet Aiken, despite his poetry’s con-
cern with autobiography, always remained behind
his poetry. He did not have the temperament to be
a celebrity poet.
Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, R. P. Black-
mur says Aiken’s “work [is] in a continuous rela-
tion to the chaos of [his] sensibilit[y]... and each
separate poem issues with a kind of random spon-
taneity.” Writing in the Georgia Reviewshortly af-
ter Aiken’s death, Calvin S. Brown pays tribute to
Aiken and also touches upon what makes his po-
etry sometimes difficult: “This poetry exhibits an
astonishing variety of forms and types. Beginning
with narrative verse, he soon reduced the narrative
element to a mere scaffolding—often perilously
flimsy—to support an investigation of the minds
and inner lives of his characters.”
Criticism
Neil Heims
Neil Heims is a writer and teacher living in
Paris. In this essay, he discusses the problem of
how to use a poet’s biography in the interpretation
of his work.
A recurring problem for anyone who reads po-
etry and wants to understand it is the problem of
determining what information about a poem is use-
ful in the interpretation of the poem and where
the information might come from. In the opening
decades of the twentieth century, an aesthetic of
depersonalization, meaning a belief that the poet
should be removed from the poem, dominated
theories about how to write poetry. For example,
T. S. Eliot not only was one of the century’s ma-
jor English poets, he also set the critical values and
standards that would be used to judge poetry and
determine the way poetry ought to be interpreted.
Writing in 1920, he says in “Tradition and the
Individual Talent,” a classic of twentieth-century
criticism, “The progress of an artist is a continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personal-
ity.” This implies that in trying to understand a
poem, nothing about the poet’s life, thought, or
environment may be introduced.
I. A. Richards, whose influence was as impor-
tant as Eliot’s in shaping the way people, especially
readers in universities, think about English poetry,
published Practical Criticismnine years later, in- In it, he solidifies a position he had been
working on through the 1920s. Simply stated,
Richards argues for an approach to poetry that re-
gards each poem as a hermetic object, meaning that
it is impervious to outside interference or influence.
It exists in its own independence, isolated and sep-
arate from everything but itself, even from other
poems. A poem’s meaning can be found only from
closely reading the words of the poem itself and re-
flecting on their relation to nothing else but each
other. Requirements of reading this way are to ac-
cept that meaning might, in fact, be elusive and to
recognize ambiguity as an inherent and inescapable
part of knowing and understanding.
At the same time that this self-enclosed idea of
reading was establishing itself, another wave, as
strong and as influential, arose. In 1893, two physi-
cians, Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, published
Studies in Hysteria, a series of case histories of pa-
tients who were plagued with incapacitating condi-
tions that were not the result of physical problems
but were apparently mental or emotional in origin.
These conditions, the doctors argued, would go into
remission when the sufferers could think about and
interpret their symptoms based on associations they
brought forth when they let themselves say whatever
came into their minds—that is, by “free association.”
In 1900, Freud published The Interpretation of
Dreams(first English translation, 1913), which used
his psychoanalytic method of free association to pen-
etrate the surface of dreams, or the “manifest” con-
tent, and uncover the hidden meaning of dreams,
their “latent” or underlying content. This method of
interpretation is the opposite of the critical method
proposed by Eliot and Richards. They turn interpre-
tation back upon the object being interpreted (the
The Room