Arts and Letters

Louise Bogan would certainly, and rightly, have objected to being called a poetess, a term which implies: "For a female, her verse is not bad." She would, however, I think, have gladly and proudly admitted to being a woman poet, for on several occasions she discussed the difference in attitude of the two sexes towards the art of poetry, and the different threats they encounter in trying to write well. Many a man must have had the experience, after telling a woman a funny story, of hearing her ask: "But did it really happen?" The male imagination, it would seem—perhaps because we are biological luxuries—enjoys making things up, creating worlds which have little, if anything to do with the real one. So far as I know, all the writers of nonsense verse have been men. Also, all the poets whom, in a pejorative sense, I would call aesthetes, have been men. Men are tempted, as women, it would seem, are not, to say things and express emotions, not because they believe them to be true or have actually felt them, but because they believe them to be poetically interesting and effective.

For a woman poet, as Louise Bogan said, the danger is different. Her imagination is only stimulated by real events and personal emotional experiences—"crises," as she called them. She is, therefore, not tempted to lie; but she is more tempted than a man to be over-intense in describing them. She finds it harder to attain the objectivity towards and detachment from her experience which all art requires.

Knowing this, Louise Bogan was able to guard against it. Most of her poems are obviously personal, but not one is embarrassing. This poem, for example, is almost certainly, I should say, based on an actual dream, but the significance of the dream has been made valid for everyone.

THE MEETING

For years I thought I knew, at the bottom of the dream,
Who spoke but to say farewell,
Whose smile dissolved, after his first words,
Gentle and plausible.

Each time I found him, it was always the same:
Recognition and surprise,
And then the silence, after the first words,
And the shifting of the eyes.

Then the moment when he had nothing to say
And only smiled again,
But this time towards a place beyond me, where I could not stay—
No world of men.

Now I am not sure. Who are you? Who have you been?
Why do our paths cross?
At the deepest bottom of the dream you are let in,
A symbol of loss.

Eye to eye we look, and we greet each other
Like friends from the same land.
Bitter compliance! Like a faithless brother
You take and drop my hand.

Her standards for judging her own work were extremely severe; in consequence, she was not a prolific poet. The last collection made by herself, The Blue Estuaries 1923-1968, contains one hundred and thirty-two poems, which means that her average production of poems she thought worth preserving was less than three per annum.

In judging a poem, one looks for two things: craftsmanship—it should be a well-made verbal object; and uniqueness of perspective—nobody but the author could have written it. Louise Bogan's poems satisfy both criteria. Not one of them is shoddily constructed, and not one reminds one of another poet. Indeed, while in the case of most poets one can detect the influence of other poets, dead or contemporary, a specific influence on her work would be hard to find. One can only say that her work inherits from the general tradition of English poetry, and that, on her personally, modernist experiments and innovations had little or no effect.

One might have expected this to make her as a critic narrow-minded and hostile to experiment, but it did not. On the contrary, she was the kind of reviewer every writer hopes for, someone who judges his work in terms of what he is trying to do, and who takes more pleasure in pointing out virtues than defects. At the same time she was no blurb writer. Take, for example, this admirable passage about surrealism:

Surrealist poets have gone into the subconscious as one would take a short trip into the country, and have brought back some objects of grisly or erotic-sadistic connotation, or a handful of unrelated images, in order to prove their journey. It has not occurred to them that the journey has been taken many times, that human imagination has, before this, hung a golden bough before the entrance to hell, and has described the profound changes the true journey brings about. It is a journey not to be undertaken lightly, or described without tension of any kind.

Before returning to her poetry, a word should be said about another activity of hers, translation. Goethe's prose is not easy but, in collaboration with Elizabeth Mayer, she produced first-rate English versions of Werther, Novella, and Elective Affinities.

But of course the poems are the main thing. Their range of subject matter may not be very wide, but there is plenty of rhythmical variety, and there are poems which, if unsigned, one would not immediately attribute to her.

For instance, "Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral," of which this is one stanza:

Self-fertile flowers are feeble and need priming.
Nature is for this priming, it appears.
Some flowers, like water-clocks, have perfect timing:
Pistil and anthers rise, as though on gears;
One's up and when t'other's down; one falls; one's climbing.

By temperament she was not a euphoric character and in her life she had much to endure. What, aside from their technical excellence, is most impressive about her poems is the unflinching courage with which she faced her problems, her determination never to surrender to self-pity, but to wrest beauty and joy out of dark places.

She clearly had a deep love and understanding of music, and I can think of no other poet in this century and few in others who have written more lyrics which cry out for a composer to set them. To mention only a few, "Roman Fountain," "Song for a Lyre," "To Be Sung on the Water," "Musician," and, finest, perhaps, of all, "Henceforth, from the Mind."

Henceforth, from the mind,
For your whole joy, must spring
Such joy as you may find
In any earthly thing,
And every time and place
Will take your thought for grace.

Henceforth, from the tongue,
From shallow speech alone,
Comes joy you thought, when young,
Would wring you to the bone,
Would pierce you to the heart
And spoil its stop and start.

Henceforward, from the shell,
Wherein you heard, and wondered
At oceans like a bell
So far from ocean sundered—
A smothered sound that sleeps
Long lost within lost deeps,

Will chime you change and hours,
The shadow of increase,
Will sound you flowers
Born under troubled peace—
Henceforth, henceforth
Will echo sea and earth.

It was a privilege to have known her. It will always be a privilege to read her. Our Academy has suffered a grievous loss.