According to Catharine F. Seigel, writing in “Conrad Aiken and the Seduction of Suicide,” “one would be hard pressed to name another U.S. writer of the first half of the twentieth century [besides Aiken] who so nearly satisfied T. S. Eliot's famous conditions for literary greatness: abundance, variety, and complete competence.” Yet Aiken is more esteemed by poets and critics than he is popular among readers. As Seigel says, Louis Untermeyer wrote an article in the Saturday Review in 1967 titled “Conrad Aiken: Our Best Known Unread Poet.” Fifteen years before that, Seigel also says, the critic Mark Schorer, writing in the Nation, called the critical neglect of Aiken's work “a conspiracy of silence.”

Perhaps the main reason for this is that Aiken has been out of step with one of the fundamental aesthetic principles that governed poetry in the twentieth century, as formulated by T...