The first of a planned two-volume biography, Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale follows Aiken's early life from his birth in 1889 to 1925 when he stood on the threshold of both nervous breakdown and poetic success. It was then that Aiken began to face his paradoxically idyllic and tragic Savannah childhood and to confront the events of February 27, 1901. On that day, the eleven-year-old Aiken heard gunshots punctuate a nightlong argument between his mother and father. Running into the next room, he discovered his mother murdered and his father dead by suicide. Sounding the deep reverberations of those events in Aiken's mind, Edward Butscher follows the poet's life and work as he sought to regain, in some permanent form, the idyll he had lost as a child. Butscher tells of Aiken's determined efforts to gain recognition for his verse in the fevered cultural circuits of the early twentieth century—from his friendship, begun at Harvard, with T. S. Eliot, through frustrating excursions into the literary society of England and repeated trips on the poetic “trade route” from his home in Boston to Chicago and New York, to often sharp encounters with such powerful cultural barons as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Harriet Monroe. Hoping to build his reputation on a series of detached poetic “symphonies,” to keep depression from boiling over into madness and suicide, Aiken skirted the border of his deepest memories and fears—a border he would cross in the works that lay ahead.

Poet, short story writer, critic and novelist, Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) has been called the most metaphysical, the most learned, and the most modern of poets. With writing that reflects an intense interest in psychological, philosophical, and scientific issues, Aiken remains a unique influence on modern writers and critics today. In his lifetime, Aiken received many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1930 and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1954. He served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1950-1952.

A profound examination of the mysteries of memory and perception from one of the twentieth century's most admired literary artists The train races from New York to Boston. For Andrew Cather, it is much too fast. He will return home three days early, and he is both terrified and intrigued by what he may find there. He pictures himself unlocking the door to his quiet Cambridge house, padding silently through its darkened halls, and finally discovering the thing he both fears and yearns to see: his wife in the arms of another man. Cather knows that what he finds in Cambridge may destroy his life, yet finally set him free. A masterful portrait of an average man at the edge of a shocking precipice, "Great Circle" is a triumph of psychological realism. One of Sigmund Freud's favorite novels, it is a probing exploration of the secrets of consciousness.

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Introduces in verse a compendium of confusing creatures such as the camelephant and the guinaepiguana and describes their activities.