"THE Melody of Chaos" is a very apt title for this attempt to interpret the works of Conrad Aiken and certain of his associates in the psychoanalytical schools of writing. A good portion of the book is concerned with exposing the essential chaotic nature of the material with which these writers are working, and most of the rest is given over to an evaluation of Aiken's poetry in terms of this burrowing about at the hidden roots of action.

As a resume of the various modern writers in the so called stream of consciousness school the book is excellent. Proust, Andre Gide, Joyce and others are analyzed or even psychoanalyzed and the purpose and method in their apparent madness are clearly and succinctly examined. The frequent discontinuities of action and the indefinite blurring and even incoherent quality of these authors are attributed to the multiplicity of selves within the individual and the generally chaotic and tangled mass of impulses which govern conscious action. This attempt to delineate incipient thought and the very springs of consciousness have necessitated a new technique especially in those writers like Joyce who are tending toward what might be called the steam of subconsciousness in which even the words are hardly formulated into sentences.

Conrad Aiken's poetry with which the book is chiefly concerned has just this vague, rather exasperating indefiniteness. Mr. Peterson seeks to justify this and the often baffling images invoked by the poet as true to the dim and distorted mirrors of man's mind on which are recorded the images of external objects. One cannot quarrel with the author's competent interpretation of Alken's method, but there is a difference of opinion as to the value of this type compared to the behavioristic mode of writing in which the actions of a character are described and explained from without. Subjective writing is very effective for that limited number of individuals who react to external stimuli in the same way that the author or his characters do. However it seems likely that in future ages it will be increasingly difficult for the reader to discern the melody in the chaos of images flitting across the character's brain. It must be admitted that Mr. Peterson does not attempt to exalt this introspective dreamlike poetry of Aiken's, but takes it as an excellent example of important trends in modern literature.

The copious quotations from Aiken's poetry and the accompanying long interpretative passages by Mr. Peterson make one feel at times as if the poetry were a sort of program music to be explained in the prose terms of psychology such a Paranoia, Megalomania or various other complexes. In these interpretations the poet's relationship to T. S. Eliot is indicated and also in certain later poems a streak of morbid bitterness is traced to the Elizabethans, Donne, Marston and Webster. The abstruse nature of Aiken's poetry can be seen in the conclusion as to his five symphonies written between 1915 and 1920.

"He wrote of the mind in groping, desperate pursuit of the unattainable; of the renunciation of pursuit for a life of vicarious excitment; of multitudinous selves, like a multitude of cells, forming a city's enormous brain; of the mystery of personal identity: of the impossibility of escape from the ego. Arid dangerous themes for poetry, certainly, but in elaborating them Aiken composed an iridescent epic of our inner world."

There seems to be little reason for a whole chapter on Aiken's novel. "Blue Voyage", which as a particularly clear elucidation of the author's own ideas could hardly by improved on by another layer of prose by Mr. Peterson. However, taken all in all he has written a lucid and illuminating appreciation of Courad Aiken whom he realizes to have gone as far as possible in the direction of spiritual disorder without plunging into madness," a poet who lives with the language of Freud and the feelings of Othello."