“Even at its best a poem cannot come straight out of the heart, but must break away in some oblique fashion from the body of sorrow or joy…” — poet/editor Louise Bogan

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“In a time lacking in truth and certainty, filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.” — Louise Bogan

Louise Bogan was poetry editor of The New Yorker for years, so she was responsible, at the time, for setting the standard for the poetry selected. This was for better or worse. Her influence was seen by many as outsized. Her idea of what poetry was, what it should sound like, became the standard. Elizabeth Bishop joked in her letters to Robert Lowell about how she was writing this or that poem to pass Bogan’s standards, because she needed the money.

Bogan’s own poetry is not sentimental. She couldn’t afford it. She had many nervous breakdowns through her life, yet still managed to be productive as hell (not a small feat). You get the sense in her work that she couldn’t afford to dwell on her feelings. Her interest was in carving out the extraneous elements of things like fear of death, womanhood, nightmares, pain – and seeing what was left on the table. Bogan was glad that the 19th century, with its accepted assumptions and lies, was over. She was glad there was such a thing as psychoanalysis, and she was glad to see things progress. In 1951, she wrote that it was good to open up “fresh sources of moral, as well as of aesthetic courage”, and she felt poetry could handle “subconscious and irrational processes”. She loved Rilke and Yeats.

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It’s well worth it to read the following piece about Louise Bogan’s prose, including her 1923 essay “The Springs of Poetry,” included in full at the link.

Any writer will probably recognize her words on procrastination and avoidance: one will do ANYTHING to avoid sitting down to write.

She was born in 1897 and died in 1970. Her parents were Irish, but she was born in Maine. She married, had a child, went to Boston University.

“Women” is perhaps her best-known poem. She looks at other women and wishes she had less “wilderness” in her. Wilderness meaning: madness, chaos, griefs, confusion. Someone said they admired my intensity recently, and it was a very sweet comment, but my response was: I’m not sure such intensity is actually healthy or good or helpful, although it honestly is just the way I am built. But it is nothing to be romantic about. It is actually quite terrible (or it can be).

It reminds me a bit of an exchange from Men in Black that I love and reference often, especially in current mood-of-the-times when platitudes (“People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” “If you love something set it free …” “Everything happens for a reason.”) are used so indiscriminately that it starts to seem callous, to those of us who don’t bounce back from things with dispatch. These people who say such things seem to want to SKIP OVER the pain part. Anyway, here’s the Men in Black exchange:

Jay: “You know what they say. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

Kay: “Try it.”

In Louise Bogan’s “Women” I feel her separateness from her gender, from certain types of experience. It’s brutal and critical (reminiscent of Rebecca West’s famous observation that while men are “lunatics”, women are “idiots,” and by that she meant women had a tendency to wrap themselves up in personal concerns – even activist women like the suffragette groups she started out with: What’s all this talk about sex and husbands not doing housework? What about economic and political and social injustice? Women trained by society to be small and personal when they should be big and political.) Despite Bogan’s brutal eye, I also feel a bit of wistfulness in the poem. She may seem to be saying, “God, your life is so dull”, but after a time, one gets a little sick of “excitement”, you get worn out, and a little “dullness” might be welcome.

Only maybe by that point you are no longer capable of it.

WOMEN

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead.
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.

QUOTES:

Louise Bogan, letter, May 1, 1938:

[I was born] ten years before Auden, Isherwood, and L. MacNeice, and about two thousand years after Sappho.

William Rose Benet:

Her poetry is, and always has been, intensely personal. She has inherited the Celtic magic of language, but has blended it somehow with the tartness of New England.

Thomas Lask, The New York Times:

[Bogan] took a median position between the New Criticism at one end and sociological (or Marxian) criticism at the other. She refused to identify the poet with the historical processes of his age…On the other hand, she was not willing to strip the work down to its formal elements only, as if the poet was a disembodied muse living in no fixed time or place and without those idiosyncrasies that made him what he was and no other. There is also little poking around in myth or in depth psychology… [Her] manner was so quiet, her style so unemphatic that they sometimes obscured the force of her judgments…She could be wrong and she could be disappointing in her pieces, which is to say that she was mortal. An exquisite and scrupulous craftsman with a leaning to order, she had a natural tendency to respond to formal workmanship.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Though Bogan is usually categorized as a metaphysical poet, influenced by John Donne, T.S. Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom, her poetry actually was haunted by William Butler Yeats’s powerful work, with overtones also of Emily Dickinson.

Louise Bogan:

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

Brett C. Millier:

One of the finest lyric poets America has produced…The fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

In 1919, Louise Bogan moved to New York, eventually becoming the poetry editor of The New Yorker; she, too, strongly advocated poetry in traditional meter and rhyme, but her polished poems explore terrors and griefs that elude strict control.

Marianne Moore:

Louise Bogan’s art is compactness compacted. Emotion with her, as she has said of certain fiction is ‘itself form, the kernel which builds outward form from inward intensity.’ She uses a kind of forged rhetoric that nevertheless seems inevitable.

Richard Eberhart, The New York Times:

Louise Bogan’s poems adhere to the center of English with a dark lyrical force. What she has to say is important. How she says it is pleasing. She is a compulsive poet first, a stylist second. When compulsion and style meet, we have a strong, inimitable Bogan poem.

Louise Bogan, “The Springs of Poetry” (1923) read in full here:

Sometimes the poet does not entirely succeed in diverting his energies. He expresses himself, determined to take a holiday from any emotion at all, being certain that to hear, see, smell and touch, merely, is enough. His hand has become chilled, from being held too long against the ground to feel how it is cold; his mind flinches at cutting down once again into the dark with the knife of irony or analysis.

So he writes a poem at third, fourth, or fifth hand, bred out of some delicate fantastic ruse of the brain. Even at its best a poem cannot come straight out of the heart, but must break away in some oblique fashion from the body of sorrow or joy, — be the mask, not the incredible face, — yet the synthetic poem can never be more than a veil dropped before a void. It may sound, to change the images, in ears uninitiate to the festival, but never to those, who, having once heard, can recognize again the maenad cry.

Brett C. Millier:

The difficulties and instabilities of her childhood produced in Bogan a preoccupation with betrayal and a distrust of others, a highly romantic nature, and a preference for the arrangements of art over grim, workaday reality.

Paul Ramsey, Iowa Review:

Louise Bogan is a great lyric poet. To say that some of her lyrics will last as long as English is spoken is to say too little. For since value inheres in eternity, the worth of her poems is not finally to be measured by the length of enduring. To have written ‘Song for the Last Act,’ ‘Old Countryside,’ ‘Men Loved Wholly beyond Wisdom,’ … and some dozens of other poems of very nearly comparable excellence is to have wrought one of the high achievements of the human spirit, and to deserve our celebration and our love.

Louise Bogan, journal entry:

The month, the time of day; children are coming indoors from roads bordered by orchards heavy with apples, into rooms with looped-back curtains, and old mirrors. Among the dahlias and asters of the lots gardens, their mothers pull the dried clothes from the line, reaching their arms above their heads so that their cotton dresses under the shawl thrown about their shoulders are pulled tightly upward from the thin apron string binding their waists. The wind rattles the lattice over the wellhead; the house smells of freshly baked bread. It is already dark; the month goes on; the apples will be gathered tomorrow.

The age when one looks at the date on pennies, watches people’s eyes and mouths, believes that something marvelous may go on in a shuttered house.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Bogan praised the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke for qualities displayed by her own verse–the patience and power of looking and the ability to carry through a single poetic concept informed by passion. She also admired the lyric poetry of W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden. Though her poems are terse and unadjectival, they are oftne visionary. This is so whether they work with personal experience, always distilled, or with traditional myth (“Medusa” and “Cassandra”). “Women” bitterly pretends to specify the qualities women do not have, but indicates those they posses. Bogan works with a chisel rather than a brush, priding herself on spareness of line and on avoiding sentimentality, while making room for grief.

Louise Bogan, journal entry:

The early darkness in September comes as the most blessed relief in the year. Pale green celery tops sprout out of bags in the delivery boys’ carts and a mottled light falls over the shady side of the street, reflected from the windows in high buildings. Early morning in September.

Louise Bogan, “The Springs of Poetry” (1923):

The poem is always a last resort.

Brett C. Millier:

Her poems are by no means dogmatically feminist; Bogan held a deep distrust for all ideological commitment. In fact, she has been castigated somewhat unfairly by contemporary feminists.

Review in Books:

[Bogan] has achieved a mastery of form rare in the realm of modern poetry. There is creative architecture in even the slightest of her lyrics. Miss Bogan works not as a landscape painter (while her visual imagery is exact, it does not depend on color alone), nor yet as a musician—-although in many of her poems, the auditory imagery is superior to the visual: the ear listens, even as the eye sees. Her art is that of a sculpture.

New York Times review of The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968:

Now that we can see the sweep of forty-five years work in this collection of over a hundred poems, we can judge what a feat of character it has been…[Her diction] stems from the severest lyrical tradition in English…[Her language is] as supple as it is accurate, dealing with things in their own tones.”

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6 Responses to “Even at its best a poem cannot come straight out of the heart, but must break away in some oblique fashion from the body of sorrow or joy…” — poet/editor Louise Bogan

  1. Carm says:

    I have long loved this poem, but haven’t always been able to verbalize why. Thanks for your commentary!

  2. red says:

    Carm – thanks – yeah, her stuff is really good. Painful but cold.

  3. regina Bartkoff says:

    I loved this. I’ve never heard of Louise Bogan, so thank you very much! Yes, that ‘Wilderness’ line sticks with you. You feel her deep intensity underneath all this to the point, dry clear stuff.
    Also read your piece ‘the facts’ from this, which I liked very much too. I too was laughing so much, but feeling heartache coming all the way. I liked it too because you get very involved in the story, and wanting to know what happened, really surprised when you just let it drop in he’s getting married in a week. What?! call off the wedding you idiot! (this is more of a mystery to me then someone feeling deeply intense about someone) How can you marry someone when you feel this way about another? Then you start passing judgments, well obviously he’s making the safe choice, to well, maybe he does love the wife to be, but how can he not “live without her” to make his dinner? till you realize you don’t know really the heart of any of the three. The twig breaking line is devastating. Great story. (still feel the guy is a jerk though and not worthy of either woman, but then again…..)

  4. red says:

    Regina – haha Thank you so much for reading. It’s the kind of piece that does generate strong responses, and I love to hear all of it!!

    Funny (to me) anecdote: One of my main goals (I see now) in writing it was to capture how funny he was. I wanted there to be ZERO bitterness in it, and personal feelings had to be left out of it – except for the last line.

    Most of my friends who went thru the whole thing with me found the piece (initially) enraging – everyone was furious at him – and even now, when his name comes up, there’s a strong response.

    But the first person I sent it to after I wrote it was him. He called me at 1 o’clock in the morning, and he was GUFFAWING – he was driving somewhere – and we talked on the phone, laughing until we cried about the midgets and Trixie Belden and everything else – Not that he didn’t understand my pain, but he really clicked into the humor of the piece, in a way my friends did not.- He was the only one who found it funny. Hysterical to me.

    I thought it was very interesting (and perfect) that he didn’t call me, shamefaced or sad or pitying me (the worst feeling) – like I was an animal he had just run over but that he called me, howling with laughter.

    That was so important to me. Not to make him laugh – but the piece would be really really funny.

    Again: thank you!!

  5. Amy says:

    Hi Sheila,
    I stumbled on your site looking firstly at your piece on the Selected Journals of LM Montgomery Vol 5.
    I stayed to read more and, to my delight, found this Louise Bogan piece. You have a lovely ‘voice’. I look forward to revisiting.

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