The winter evening settles down With smells of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about his feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps, And then the lighting of the lamps. _Conrad Aiken_ Conrad (Potter) Aiken was born at Savannah, Georgia, August 5, 1889. He attended Harvard, receiving his A.B. in 1912, travelled extensively for three years, and since then, he has devoted all his time to literature, living at South Yarmouth, Massachusetts. The most outstanding feature of Aiken’s creative work is its rapid adaptability and its slow growth. His first volume, _Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse_ (1914), is the Keats tradition crossed, paraphrased (and vulgarized) by Masefield. _Turns and Movies_ (1916) is a complete change; Masefield is exchanged for Masters. But in the less conspicuous half of this book, Aiken begins to speak with his true voice. Here he is the natural musician, playing with new rhythms, haunting cadences. _The Jig of Forslin_ (1916) is an elaboration of his method. In this volume, Aiken goes back to the narrative—or rather, to a series of loosely connected stories—and, reinforced by studies in analytical psychology, explores “the process of vicarious wish fulfilment by which civilized man enriches his circumscribed life.” _Nocturne of Remembered Spring_ (1917), _The Charnel Rose_ (1918) and _The House of Dust_ (1920) are packed with a tired but often beautiful music. Even though much of it is enlivened by injections of T. S. Eliot’s conversational idiom, the effect is often moony and monotonous. Rain seems to fall persistently through these volumes; dust blows down the street, the shadows blur; everything dissolves in a mist of boredom and forgetfulness. Even the poignance seems on the point of falling asleep. Often Aiken loses himself in this watery welter of language. In trying to create a closer _liaison_ between poetry and music, he gives, too frequently, so much importance to the rise and fall of syllables that his very excess of music defeats his purpose. His verse, thus, gains greatly on the sensuous side but loses, in its cloying indefiniteness, that vitality and sharpness of speech which is the very blood of poetry.