Conrad Potter Aiken (1889 - 1973) was an American poet and prose writer who is now mainly known for his lifelong friendship with T. S. Eliot, but whose own contemporary fame had been established since the publication of Earth Triumphant (1914), his first collection of poetry. Unlike Eliot, whose mixed opinions on Keats’s poetry were in line with the Modernists’ struggle to find new forms of poetic expression, Aiken was deeply impressed by Keats’s work and personal story. When he arrived in Europe in 1911 he was eager to visit the city where the Romantic poet lived and the house in which he died. Even his choice of hotel in Rome (Muller’s Bavaria) was made with the purpose of being close to the Keats-Shelley Memorial, where he worked regularly during his Roman sojourn. In this note, accompanied by a letter by the museum’s Librarian Andrea Ferretti, Aiken mentions his interest in visiting the House (noting that his Harvard thesis is ‘on this subject’) and his donation of an, 1869 edition of Keats’s Poetical Works. Our guest book reports his first visit as early as 25 April, six days after Ferretti had recommended him to the House co-founder Harry Nelson Gay. Conrad Potter Aiken (1889 – 1973) was an American poet and prose writer who is now mainly known for his lifelong friendship with T. S. Eliot, but whose own contemporary fame had been established since the publication of Earth Triumphant (1914), his first collection of poetry. Unlike Eliot, whose mixed opinions on Keats’s poetry were in line with the Modernists’ struggle to find new forms of poetic expression, Aiken was deeply impressed by Keats’s work and personal story. When he arrived in Europe in 1911 he was eager to visit the city where the Romantic poet lived and the house in which he died. Even his choice of hotel in Rome (Muller’s Bavaria) was made with the purpose of being close to the Keats-Shelley Memorial, where he worked regularly during his Roman sojourn. In this note, accompanied by a letter by the museum’s Librarian Andrea Ferretti, Aiken mentions his interest in visiting the House (noting that his Harvard thesis is ‘on this subject’) and his donation of an 1869 edition of Keats’s Poetical Works. Our guest book reports his first visit as early as 25 April, six days after Ferretti had recommended him to the House co-founder Harry Nelson Gay.
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