Description:

Aiken Conrad

1pp TLS signed by American author Conrad Aiken as “Conrad Aiken” at center of unmarked cream stationery page measuring 8” x 10”. In near fine condition, with expected paper folds, a few well-creased and beginning to tear. Contains two typographical corrections, one in pen and the other in pencil.

 

Sharpless Dodson Green, an educator from the mid-Atlantic states, frequently contacted notables of the day to engage with his high school-aged pupils. These famous writers, doctors, politicians, and personalities were asked to give life advice to the graduating seniors, or to serve as mentors.

 

Conrad Aiken was delighted to act as a mentor to Green’s gang of teenagers. Writing from “Lookout Cottage, Winchelsea, Sussex” on January 23, 1923, Aiken replied: “Will you kindly extend to the eight of your students who were so good as to choose me my very cordial greetings and my best wishes for their individual and collective success? I don’t know that a poet can be expected to give sound business advice to budding business men and women, beyond advising them, perhaps, not to be poets; that is, if they can help it! Joking aside, however, I am very much pleased at being thus honored by my ‘eight’; and it seems to me to be a good augury for the future of America that young business men and women should take so friendly an interest in the arts”.

 

In many ways, the poetry of Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) was indelibly marked by the 1901 murder suicide of his parents in a Savannah, Georgia townhouse. Aiken would process this event, as well as other emotional traumas, in his many physiologically driven poems and short stories. Aiken grew up with relatives in Massachusetts before marrying and relocating to southeastern England in 1921. This letter dates from eight months after Aiken and his young family moved into Lookout Cottage in the spring of 1922.

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