Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken worked across American poetry, fiction, criticism, and memoir, repeatedly exploring consciousness, memory, music, and psychological division. A Harvard contemporary and lifelong friend of T. S. Eliot, he developed a symbolist and musical approach that shaped both poetry and prose. Boston's Four Seas Company issued The Charnel Rose, Senlin in 1918, joining the title sequence, the long poem Senlin: A Biography, and other poems. Senlin became one of Aiken's recurring figures, a vehicle for asking how an individual mind constructs identity and perceives the world. Aiken later won the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems and the 1954 National Book Award for Collected Poems, while also serving as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. His books include Earth Triumphant, The House of Dust, and the autobiographical Ushant. The Charnel Rose, Senlin belongs to his early experimental period, when dramatic voices, dream states, and patterned sound were becoming the central instruments of his mature writing.