Bogan, Louise | Robert L. Wolf (essay date 1924)
Robert L. Wolf (essay date 1924)
SOURCE: "Impassioned Austerity," in Poetry, Vol. XXIII, No. 6, March, 1924, pp. 335–38.
[In the following review, Wolf avers that the language in Body of This Death is often inadequate for the meaning Bogan tries to convey.]
Louise Bogan's Body of This Death has more than anything else the quality of direct, simple, almost cruel statement. In a kind of contained twilight frenzy, without excuse or hesitation, the poet lays her hand deliberately upon the central key of a mood, and follows her own instruction:
Then, for every passion's sake,
Beat upon it till it break.
The material of the book is, in symbol or simple fact, the love experience of a modern woman, in Miss Bogan's case tinged with a tragedy that is not less impressive for being nameless. As in the lyric called "Song," below, it is throughout single, insistent, unvarnished:
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