Selected Poems (Aiken)

​"Punch: The Immortal Liar," and "The Pilgrimage of Festus" are reprinted by permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorized publishers.

"Improvisations," "Priapus and the Pool," "Seven Twilights," "Exile," "Samadhi," "Poverty Grass," "Psychomachia," "Chiaroscuro: Rose," "King Borborigmi," "And in the Hanging Gardens," "The Wedding," "God's Acre," "The Road," "Dead Leaf in May," "Cliff Meeting," "Sea Holly," "Elder Tree," "The Room," "Sound of Breaking," "An Old Man Weeping," and "Electra," from "Priapus and the Pool and Other Poems" are reprinted by permission of Horace Liveright, Inc., copyrighted 1925.

In this selection, I have included nothing at all from my first bock, Earth Triumphant, and only four poems from my second and fourth books, Turns and Movies, and Nocturne of Remembered Spring. My other six books of verse—The Jig of Forslin, The Charnel Rose, The House of Dust, Punch: The Immortal Liar, The Pilgrimage of Festus, and Priapus and the Pool—are given, with one exception, in their entirety. For various reasons, the title poem of The Charnel Rose has been omitted. One poem, Goya, is here printed as verse for the first time—having previously appeared only as a prose passage in my novel, Blue Voyage. The arrangement, throughout, has been chronological: the poems are presented, not in the order in which they were first published, but, except for a few minor instances, in the order in which they were written.

It has been necessary to omit the prefaces to The Jig of Forslin and The Pilgrimage of Festus. The latter was described, in its preface, as a poetic essay in epistemology, or the problem of knowledge; its hero is anybody or nobodys; in short, the poem is a philosophical allegory. The former was apologized for as a symphony, or pseudosymphony, based on the idea of vicarious experience, and on the part played by that phenomenon in the nature of civilized consciousness.

It remains finally to be noted that for an episode in The Jig of Forslin I am indebted to a story by Gautier; and similarly, in The House of Dust, to a story by Lafcadio Hearn.