¹ As for the “overtones” in “The Waste Land”—“anticipated, at a measurable distance” by Aiken in “Senlin” (1918), as noted by Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska in their History of American Poetry—I am not so sure. Perhaps these writers do not sufficiently take into account how much, in its overtones, “Senlin” itself may have owed to “Prufrock” and other early poems of Eliot's. The passages they cite suggest to me not so much anticipation of “The Waste Land” by “Senlin” as anticipation of “Senlin” by “Prufrock” or even by “La Figlia Che Piange,” which Aiken could have read in Eliot's 1917 volume.

² The “Preludes for Memnon” are included in Aiken's Collected Poems (1953) together with some 300 pages more of his work since 1931. It will be noted that, in his latest collection, Aiken substantially confirms his critical judgment on the work of the first three or four years as shown in the earlier Selected Poems. He does, indeed, restore “Turns and Movies” as having “at least a crude vitality,” and “The Charnel Rose” (severely revised) as necessary to the full development of his theme in the series, “The Divine Pilgrim.” But at the same time he throws overboard several of the poems included in the earlier selection which only serve to show “the lengths to which an obsession with the ‘musical’ analogies of poetry could be carried.”