Conrad Aiken: A Literary Analysis

Recently a grand discovery was made in the back of a journal in Savannah, Ga. The journal belonged to Conrad Aiken before his death in 1973. It was found while an organization called The Aiken Project was cleaning out his safety deposit box, with the permission of his children, in order to create an exhibit in the Savannah College of Art and Design Library. Aiken is one of Savannah’s well-known poets of the 20th century, and because of this The Aiken Project, created in his honor, wants to create an exhibit to showcase his greatest short stories and poems. While researching for this exhibit it was discovered that Aiken owned a safe deposit box that has remained relatively untouched by his children, with whom he left the key, until 1990 when …show more content…
In “Checkers” Aiken used a double-entendre for the word “bit.” It appeared in the 15th stanza when it says, “You were selfless,/ always trying to help people,/ but it bit you during the hurricane.” The word “bit” refers back to the significant other’s selflessness in that it got to him during the hurricane causing him to get hurt, but also in that, when connected to the novel, Tea Cake, the significant other, was bit by a dog and infected with rabies during the hurricane. The greatest piece of evidence involving Aiken’s style is the connection to his parents. In the letter to Hurston he talks greatly of his parent’s story and how it influenced him to write the poem, but also, Aiken was influenced by his parents’s deaths to write in the first place. His father killed Aiken’s mother and then killed himself; afterwards, Aiken was relocated to Massachusetts with his great aunt without his other three siblings (Kunitz and Haycraft). He was quickly influenced by Poe and set out on a mission, “... even after the murder-suicide, he was in search of a literary consciousness that would do his parents proud,” (McFadden). Aiken was dedicated to finding something in his life or work that his parents would have found acceptable (Adams). The story of the poem is very similar to that of Aiken’s parents. They were in love and they made a life together, but Aiken’s father, much like the significant other, became sick and thought the only way for his life to improve was to kill his wife and himself. The narrator knows that the only way for her love to find peace is to kill him. The theme of murder, in love or otherwise, can also connect to Aiken’s other poem “Red is the Color of Blood” where the narrator loves his wife so much, but she also angers him to a point of wanting to murder her (Sinclair, Laurence, and Marmo). The final piece of evidence is that Aiken always writes in