When reading Aiken, Wallace Stevens was the first to come to mind for a poet of similar style. A difference could be that where Aiken wrote poetry more for the act of speech, Stevens wrote poetry to emphasize the act of the imagination. A subtle difference, but still there. An analogy could be that Aiken’s poetry sings to the angels while Stevens’ sings with the angels. Stevens delves into abstraction and opens the poem beyond itself. Aiken more often remains linear, for the poetry to follow the thought’s progression. I personally prefer Stevens, where the thought follows the poetry, but a reviewer of Aiken’s Selected Poems at Amazon
takes a different opinion:
Harold Bloom, in his very good introductory essay, tells why Aiken matters. But I must disagree with him on the subject of Aiken's eloquence, which he considers to be the fatal flaw separating Aiken from greater poets like Stevens and Crane. To me this eloquence is precisely Aiken's strength. If more modern poets had been less interested in modelling consciousness than in analyzing it and extracting its elusive essences--yes, even sometimes extracting the ore of eloquence from the dross of momentary chaos--poetry might still have an audience.
First, a portion from Aiken's long poem,
Preludes for Memnon:
Or say that in the middle comes a music
Suddenly out of silence, and delight
Brings all that chaos to one mood of wonder;
A seed of fire, fallen in a tinder world;
And instantly the whirling darkness fills
With conflagration; upspoutings of delirium;
Cracklings and seethings; the melting rocks, the bursts
Of flame smoke-stifled, twisting, smoke-inwreathed;
Magnificence; the whole dark filled with light;
And then a silence, as the world falls back
Consumed, devoured, its giant corolla shrivelled;
And in the waning light, the pistil glowing,
Glowing and fading; and on that shrinking stage--
Whisper it, how among whispering ashes
Her pale bright beauty comes, the moon's dark daughter,
Lighting those ruins with her radiant madness...
And now a section from Stevens'
Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction:
IX
Whistle aloud, too weedy wren. I can
Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them,
Like men besides, like men in light secluded,
Enjoying angels. Whistle, forced bugler,
That bugles for the mate, nearby the nest,
Cock bugler, whistle and bugle and stop just short,
Red robin, stop in your preludes, practicing
Mere repetitions. These things at least compromise
An occupation, an exercise, a work,
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round
And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round in a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.
And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf
Above the table spins its constant spin,
So that we look at it with pleasure, look
At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.