Conrad Aiken 's works--twenty-six volumes of poetry, five novels, forty-one short stories, two volumes of criticism, and one play--present a range of achievement that made him "one of the few genuine men of letters left in our world today," as Allen Tate said, adding, when "summing up the total value of Conrad Aiken one must give a very high place to his fiction." Aiken's poetic achievement as a whole (see Collected Poems--enlarged edition, 1970--1,049 pages) resists critical evaluation in its great variety and volume, but few would contest Harold Bloom's judgment that Aiken--along with Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot--is one of "the strongest American poets born in the last three decades of the nineteenth century."

Aiken's best novels and short stories come from his psychologically intense middle period (1922-1939). Various in design as they are, they...