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Conrad Aiken

69 quotes

“The poet walked alone in a cold late rain, And thought his grief was like the crying of sea-birds; For his lover was dead, he never would love again.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'When you are dead your spirit will find my spirit, And then we shall die no more.'”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass, Through many doors to the one door of all. Soon as it's opened we shall hear a music: Or see a skeleton fall . . .”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us retrace our steps: I have deceived you: Nothing is here I could not frankly tell you: No hint of guilt, or faithlessness, or threat. Dreams—they are madness. Staring eyes—illusion. Let us return, hear music, and forget . . .”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of what she said to me that night—no matter. The strange thing came next day. My brain was full of music—something she played me—; I couldn't remember it all, but phrases of it Wreathed and wreathed among faint memories, Seeking for something, trying to tell me something, Urging to restlessness: verging on grief. I tried to play the tune, from memory,— But memory failed: the chords and discords climbed And found no resolution—only hung there, And left me morbid . . . Where, then, had I heard it? . . .”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, without my telling you, how sometimes A word or name eludes you, and you seek it Through running ghosts of shadow,—leaping at it, Lying in wait for it to spring upon it, Spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: Until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, You hear it, see it flash among the branches, And scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it— Well, it was so I followed down this music, Glimpsing a face in darkness, hearing a cry, Remembering days forgotten, moods exhausted, Corners in sunlight, puddles reflecting stars—”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The music ends. The screen grows dark. We hurry To go our devious secret ways, forgetting Those many lives . . . We loved, we laughed, we killed, We danced in fire, we drowned in a whirl of sea-waves. The flutes are stilled, and a thousand dreams are stilled.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once I loved, and she I loved was darkened. Again I loved, and love itself was darkened. Vainly we follow the circle of shadowy days. The screen at last grows dark, the flutes are silent. The doors of night are closed. We go our ways.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the mazes of loitering people, the watchful and furtive, The shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves, In the drowse of the sunlight, among the low voices, I suddenly face you”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I love you, what star do you live on?”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And the shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves Interlace with low voices and footsteps and sunlight To divide us forever.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning When the light drips through the shutters like the dew, I arise, I face the sunrise, And do the things my fathers learned to do. Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die, And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet Stand before a glass and tie my tie.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us describe the evening as it is:— The stars disposed in heaven as they are: Verlaine and Shakspere rotting, where they rot, Rimbaud remembered, and too soon forgot; Order in all things, logic in the dark; Arrangement in the atom and the spark; Time in the heart and sequence in the brain— Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine. And let us then take godhead by the neck— And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whitman had a profound influence on me. … He was useful to me in the perfection of form, as a sort of compromise between the strict and the free.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We developed a shorthand language of our own which we fell into for the rest of our lives whenever we met, no holds barred — all a matter of past reference, a common language, but basically affection, along with humor, and appreciation of each other’s minds, and of Krazy Kat . Faced with England, and the New World, and Freud and all, we always managed to relax, and go back to the kidding, and bad punning, and drinking, to the end. It really was marvelous.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do believe in this evolution of consciousness as the only thing which we can embark on, or in fact, willy-nilly, are embarked on; and along with that will go the spiritual discoveries and, I feel, the inexhaustible wonder that one feels, that opens more and more the more you know. It’s simply that this increasing knowledge constantly enlarges your kingdom and the capacity for admiring and loving the universe.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A small but brilliant advance made today by someone’s awareness may for the moment reach a very small audience, but insofar as it’s valid and beautiful, it will make its way and become part of the whole world of consciousness. So in that sense it’s all working toward this huge audience, and all working toward a better man.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think Ushant describes it pretty well, with that epigraph from Tom Brown’s School Days: “I’m the poet of White Horse Vale, sir, with Liberal notions under my cap!” For some reason those lines stuck in my head, and I’ve never forgotten them. This image became something I had to be. … I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort — I mean I didn’t give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form — all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I’ve always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do. And to study all the vowel effects and all the consonant effects and the variation in vowel sounds.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve been carrying the corpus of my grandfather — to change the famous saying—with me all my life. I was given very early two volumes of his sermons; and I never go anywhere without them. … He actually took his parish out of the Unitarian Church. As he put it, “They have defrocked not only me, but my church.” For thirty years he and the church, the New Bedford parish, were in the wilderness. Then the Unitarians, about 1890, caught up with him and embraced him. By this time he was president of the Free Religious Association and was lecturing all over the country on the necessity for a religion without dogma. And this inheritance has been my guiding light: I regard myself simply as a continuance of my grandfather, and primarily, therefore, as a teacher and preacher, and a distributor, in poetic terms, of the news of the world, by which I mean new knowledge. This is gone into at some length in Ushant. And elsewhere I have said repeatedly that as poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry’s office.”
Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source