SOURCE: "The Deciphered Heart: Conrad Aiken's Poetry and Prose Fiction," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXV, No. 3, July-September, 1967, pp. 485-520.

In the following essay, Aldrich examines Aiken's poetry and prose, but speaks of him particularly in terms of a poet who sees and responds to a dual world—the interior, individualized life of the mind, and the exterior, more anonymous world outside.

Conrad Aiken's poetry is theoretical, reflective, made of ideas; but his language is concrete, his words drawn from the objects of the actual world. From it he has gathered the things which are meaningful to him, and these make up the world of his writing, with its geography, its botany, its cosmology, and its cast of characters. It is through these "twinned worlds, the inner and outer" that Aiken has laid bare his "visible"—his "deciphered" heart.

Aiken's most successful attempts to set himself truly before...