SOURCE: "The Authority of Male Tradition," in Louise Bogan's Aesthetic of Limitation, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 19-33.

[In the following excerpt, Bowles examines the influence of the Symbolists, the Metaphysicals, W. B. Yeats, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on Bogan's artistic development.]

[T]he historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

            —T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

May a poet write as a poet or must he write as a period?

         —Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry

I have been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us …

                    —Virginia Woolf, Diary

[T]hose women artists esteemed by men are not ones to declaim themselves women. Neither in puzzlement or pain (like Lowell) nor in bitterness (like Louise Bogan).

       —Florence Howe, No More Masks!

To think about literary influence in the case of a woman writer is to find oneself in the midst of a special complexity. The woman writer must contend with two traditions: that tradition which has been considered normative, universal—the male literary tradition—and that writing which until recently was not thought of in terms of a tradition but as a kind of minor current flowing below the mainstream—the writing of women. The work of Louise Bogan gives us a particularly compelling opportunity to see how these two traditions conjoin in the poetry and thought of a distinguished woman of letters writing from the twenties through the forties in America. It is clear, on the one hand, that the woman poet comes to the tradition of male poetry from a different route than men; and it is also clear that in one way or another she must contend both with the women writers who preceded her and those who are writing in her own time. Some women poets do not make a point of avoiding the label "woman poet"; Louise Bogan, however, began her career by publicly dissociating herself from other female poets. She made it quite clear she wanted to be placed among the poets of the mainstream (male) tradition. In 1939 Bogan agreed to respond to a Partisan Review questionnaire on literary influence. She had in the past declined such requests, being private both about her life and her influences. By 1939, however, she was more conscious about her image as a poet: She had published three major books and was well ensconced as the New Yorker's poetry editor. The Partisan Review asked if she was "conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a 'usable past,'" if that usable past was primarily American, and to what extent she thought Whitman and James were crucial to the development of an American literary tradition. It is clear from her response that Louise Bogan's idea of what poetry should be came from that canon of male poets taught in literature courses in high school and college. Her response shows she wanted to be seen in terms of that tradition. She pointed first to her classical background:

Because what education I received came from New England schools, before 1916, my usable past has more of a classic basis than it would have today, even in the same background. The courses in English literature which I encountered during my secondary education and one year of college were very nutritious. But my "classical" education was severe, and I read Latin prose and poetry and Xenophon and the Iliad during my adolescence.

From this early study of the Latin poets Bogan first experienced the pleasures of formal poetry, pleasures of rhythm and control that would remain at the center of her aesthetic. Rhythm for her was bound up with human life: "So we see man, long before he has much of a 'mind,' celebrating and extending and enjoying the rhythms of his heartbeat and of his breath." And: "We think of certain tasks the rhythm of which has become set. Sowing, reaping, threshing, washing clothes …"

In her response to the Partisan Review, Bogan went on to acknowledge the modernist poets and their predecessors who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century changed ideas of what poetry should be. It is not surprising that Bogan, who was always acutely aware of literary currents and was a self-educated literary historian, looked to these poets:

Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement, and the French poets read at its suggestion, were strong influences experienced before I was twenty. The English metaphysicals (disinterred after 1912 and a literary fashion during my twenties) provided another literary pattern, and Yeats influenced my writing from 1916, when I first read Responsibilities. The American writers to whom I return are Poe (the Tales), Thoreau, E. Dickinson and Henry James. Whitman, read at sixteen, with much enthusiasm, I do not return to.

Thus, Bogan's strategy is to invoke the dominant tradition and to place herself within it. I want now to focus on the center of her response, the attribution of influence to the symbolists, the metaphysicals and Yeats, for here are the roots and the flower of modernism, that tradition in which Louise Bogan wanted her own work to find its place. I will save discussion of the only American, and the only woman in this list, Emily Dickinson, for the next chapter, and will remark upon those influences, such as Rilke, who are not mentioned in this catalogue. What Bogan leaves out of this official list is as interesting as what is put in; the list shows us her idea of the way she wished to be seen in terms of the history of poetry.

Thus, before we proceed, I want to add the complication of gender to this list of influences. Only time and distance would make it possible for Bogan to speak directly on this subject. The issues she raises in the following passage from her Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950, published in 1951, were barely under the surface as she began her literary career. As she opens her chronicle of the development of modern American poetry—after she had nearly completed her contribution to that development—Bogan puts forward the view that Edwin Arlington Robinson had restored some truth to poetry: His contribution was to bring it "from the sentimentality of the nineties toward modern veracity and psychological truth." Yet, according to Bogan, he "did little to reconstitute any revivifying warmth of feeling in the poetry of his time." In her chapter called "The Line of Truth and the Line of Feeling," Bogan then goes on to point out who did bring that "warmth of feeling" to poetry:

This task, it is now evident, was accomplished almost entirely by women poets through methods which proved to be as strong as they seemed to be delicate. The whole involved question of woman as artist cannot be dealt with here. We can at this point only follow the facts, as they unfold from the later years of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth: these facts prove that the line of poetic intensity which wavers and fades out and often completely fails in poetry written by men, on the feminine side moves on unbroken. Women, as "intuitive" beings, are less open to the success and failures, the doubts and despair which attack reason's mechanisms. Women's feeling, at best, is closely attached to the organic heart of life….

Bogan assiduously avoids "the question of the woman artist" (although in her later years she liked to quote Henry James's line about "that oddest of animals, the artist who happens to be born a woman"). She brings together those seeming opposites, strength and delicacy, as the special characteristics of women such as Lizette Woodworth Reese and Louise Imogen Guiney. Although she did not speak openly about it until the fifties, this idea of woman's gift would have a profound impact on Bogan's assessment of what was valuable in poetry and what she could use from the dominant tradition. As we look more closely at Bogan's public statement for the Partisan Review, let us keep in mind the limitations and problems inherent in any study of influence. For the sake of this study, I define as "influences" those poets from whom Bogan learned the lessons of craft and whose examples gave or denied her permission to express certain kinds of emotion in poetry. The earliest influences were the most crucial ones, those that carried her through her relatively brief lyric career. Ours will be an excursion into the ways in which Bogan's work differs from, and is similar to, those artists she invokes as a literary pattern; for, as we shall see, the male tradition has limited usefulness for the woman poet. It is, in fact, my contention that Bogan absorbed the stylistic lessons of modernism and then used those techniques to elaborate a necessarily different subject matter, the themes of love, madness, and art derived from her life as an American woman. Moreover, as our final chapters will show, although she learned from and used the male modernist tradition, she paradoxically made a major contribution to the development of a female tradition in poetry. In other words, as she used the male tradition, she transformed it for women.

Louise Bogan's letters and critical work contain many more references to the symbolists and to Yeats than to the metaphysicals. She read the symbolists early in her career and then in 1936 she carefully reread Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud. ("This morning I got down five or six notebooks, that have been gathering dust in the back closet, and discovered how v. studious I was in 1936. Pages and pages in French and English …" [To May Sarton, 23 May 1954]) Of the three major symbolist poets, I think only Mallarmé had any direct influence on her style, although his subject matter, as we shall see, was not open to her. She identified with Rimbaud's irreverence ("He did the only thing a poet should do: he shocked hell out of everyone by a series of semi-criminal acts, and then he got out, for good and all" [To Rolphe Humphries, 26 Sept. 1938]), but she did not think the "surrealist" mode suitable for women. Most of her writing about Baudelaire was occasioned by new translations of his work, including a 1947 version, which prompted her to speak of "the first poet who saw through the overweening pretensions of his time." She also noted that "the working of this stylistic machine are now outmoded. And nothing is more tiresome than the reiterated subject—so usual in the early Baudelaire—of women as puppet, as sinister idol of the alcove, or as erotic mannequin." Bogan's early understanding of what we now call "images of women" in male literature is remarkable—but what interests us most here is that Baudelaire's French rhetoric was too outdated for a modern American poet to use in any direct way. We can only say that Bogan is distantly related to Baudelaire, in the sense of a long historical line that finally produced modern poetry, since the compactness and the intensity of the modernist lyric do owe something to the author of Les Fleurs du Mal.

We do not always agree today with its critical judgments but Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement was important because it introduced the French poets to an English-speaking audience. For Symons, Mallarmé's art of suggestion, the evocation of emotion, the emotion itself in the poem, brought something new to the art:

"Poetry," said Mallarmé, "is the language of a state of crisis"; and all his poems are the evocation of a passing ecstasy, arrested in mid-flight. This ecstasy is never the mere instinctive cry of the heart, the simple human joy or sorrow … which he did not admit in poetry. It is a mental transposition of emotion or sensation, veiled with atmosphere, and becoming, as it becomes a poem, pure beauty.

In this dramatic, hyperbolic passage, we have the idea of an emotion caught by the poet, a technique Bogan imitated. Yet for her there was nothing trivial about "the cry of the heart." In fact, she once said that she could not write novels because "my talent is for the cry or the cahier …" (To Theodore Roethke, 6 Nov. 1935). For Mallarmé, as one contemporary critic has written, "the more rigidly the poetic symbol excludes the world of natural reality and the initial emotion the more closely it approximates the ideal of art." Bogan's poetry depends on this initial emotion: "Lyric poetry, if it is at all authentic … is based on emotion—on some real occasion, some real confrontation," she wrote (To Sister M. Angela, 20 Aug. 1966).

From Mallarmé and the modernist school that followed him Bogan learned distancing, surely. Yet it is a matter of degree; she would not move so far from the emotion as to disown it. Although his extreme attitude toward emotion in poetry was not her own, Mallarmé's technique was instructive for her. In 1954 she praised one of May Sarton's poems because it used a symbol like the center of a wheel, with spokes radiating out from, and returning to, the poem's center: "I liked 'Little Fugue,' unbreakable old symbolist that I am: a central symbol holds all together, and yet radiates…. This grand (in the Irish sense) method Mallarmé passed on to us…." In order to make this point more concretely—and to show how Bogan carved out a poetic territory influenced by, but different from, that of her male masters—let us look closely at one of the most famous examples of a work that articulates Mallarmé's flight into a pure realm of art. "Les Fenêtres" harks back to Baudelaire and looks forward to the English symbolists. I have selected this poem for its expression of a dominant modernist theme; only later would Mallarmé develop to their fullest the new techniques these themes made necessary. There are many other poems I might have chosen to illustrate the escape into pure beauty—and its concomitant flight from life—that characterizes male poetry from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s; I have selected this one because it stands at the beginning of a poetic tradition upon which Mallarmé had enormous influence. For in "Les Fenêtres" Mallarmé imagines a dying man in a hospital, weary of flesh and material reality, who presses his pale face up against a window bathed in sunlight. There he finds a kind of Baudelairian vision of peace and beauty that provokes an overwhelming sense of disgust with the material world, represented as women and children:

       Ainsi, pris du dégoût de l'homme a l'âme dure
       Vautré dans le bonheur, où ses seuls appétits
       Mangent, et qui s'entête à chercher cette ordure
       Pour l'offrir à la femme allaitant ses petits,
       (Thus, seized with a disgust of man whose hard soul
       Wallows in happiness, where only his appetites
       Eat, and who persists in searching for this filth
       In order to offer it to the woman nursing her children,)

The dying man-poet would leap through the windows to flee the real world. Remarkably, he sees himself reborn as an angel:

      Je fuis et je m'accroche à toutes les croisées
      D'où l'on tourne l'épaule à la vie, et, béni,
      Dans leur verre, lavé d'éternelles rosées,
      Que dore le matin chaste de l'Infini
 
      Je me mire et me vois ange! et je meurs, et j'aime
      —Que la vitre soit l'art, soit la mysticité—
      À renaître, portant mon rêve en diadème,
      Au ciel antérieur où fleurit la Beauté!
 
      (I flee and I hang on to all the windows
      From where one turns one's shoulder away from life, and, blessed,
      In their glass, washed by eternal dews,
      Which gild the chaste morning of the Infinite,
 
      I look at myself and I see myself as an angel! and I die and I love
      —Whether the pane be art or whether it be mysticism—
      To be reborn, wearing my dream like a diadem,
      To the prior heaven where Beauty flowers!)

This would-be angel must be thrust out of reverie and returned to earth: "Mais, hélas, Ici-bas est maître" (But alas! the world below is master). Forced to live with human stupidity, still, in the final stanza his bitter self asks once again, beseechingly, whether there is a way out, an escape from this life down below.

"Les Fenêtres" is a youthful poem, marked by the excesses of youth, yet it registers the sentiments of many modernist poems written before and after it. These are the poems dedicated to an aesthetic that would take life out of art. In the years that followed "Les Fenêtres" Mallarmé succeeded more and more in achieving "total annihilation of the 'life' emotion which inspired the poem." Aspects of this aesthetic would reach into twentieth-century modernist poetry. In "Les Fenêtres" Mallarmé expresses a disgust for the physical, and in an act of hubris rare for a woman who writes and impossible to Bogan, he imagines himself escaping the Real, fleeing to a transcendent realm beyond the glass. He can even see himself as Ange. The modernist aesthetic, when it posits an absolute division between art and life, is antithetical to women's realities. First, a woman is usually in no position to choose life or the state of an angel; she must go on "allaitant ses petits," feeding her children, if not literally her children, then responding to the consuming needs of real human beings. (And if she chooses to entrust the care of her daughter to others at certain points in her life, the woman poet like Bogan or H.D. is accused of consummate selfishness.) Love and relationship is at the root of Bogan's poetry; when she cut herself off, as she did sometimes, in exhaustion, she could not write.

The reader of modern poetry, then, who comes to The Blue Estuaries expecting the flight from life, the exclamations over the Void that we see in such poems as "Les Fenêtres," will be thrown off guard, even led to say this is not "good" poetry because it is different. The preoccupation with the Void can be traced to Baudelaire's "gouffre" poems; this is the abyss of nothingness that, for Baudelaire, the Catholic moralist, meant confrontation both with a loss of faith and a hanging on to it. The loss becomes complete among many male writers and thinkers later in the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, which spawned great variations on this theme of the emptiness of life. The final existential attitude, we now understand, was inimical to most women, who as the guardians of life had neither the luxury nor the predilection to think about non-life. We have said that Bogan learned something about distancing from Mallarmé and the twentieth-century modernists but she never took it as far as her male precursors. Put differently, Bogan used modernist examples to rein in her powerful emotions, but she also wanted feeling and human experience in the poem. This use of modernist form distinguishes her both from the male modernists and from the legacy of female poetry that she wished to counter. In "The Cupola" we have both the distancing and the attachment to experience. The speaker enters a dome-shaped room, a setting inspired perhaps by Bogan's Maine birthplace which had "such a cupola and eaves made of gingerbread…." She finds in this upper room a mirror that reflects nature, the outdoors. Trees and the wind appear in this mirroring:

                     THE CUPOLA
 
       A mirror hangs on the wall of the draughty cupola.
       Within the depths of glass mix the oak and the beech leaf,
       Once held to the boughs' shape, but now to the shape of the wind.
 
       Someone has hung the mirror here for no reason,
       In the shuttered room, an eye for the drifted leaves,
       For the oak leaf, the beech, a handsbreath of darkest reflection.
 
       Someone has thought alike of the bough and the wind
       And struck their shape to the wall. Each in its season
       Spills negligent death throughout the abandoned chamber.

The poem illustrates what Bogan learned from the modernists about indirect expression; seen in the context of the other poems in this, her most "removed" volume, Dark Summer (1929), the setting becomes a metaphor for the human capacity for destruction. In the first stanza, there is the feeling of the room, the presence of the speaker in it, and the moving of trees reflected in a mirror. Human agency, something even a little frightening, enters in the second, for "someone" has placed the mirror in this room, seemingly for no reason. Yet it provides an "eye," even a double vision for anyone coming into this secret, shuttered place; the lovely, inspired phrase, "a handsbreath of darkest reflection," brings the suggestion that this room yields the chance for greater self-knowledge. The poem grows more violent in the third stanza, repeating the idea of human agency: There is no choice now but to see clearly the destruction that wind and bough bring in their wake. Emotional destruction of some kind; this we know both from the poem and the volume in which it appears. The atmosphere of absence in the poem is inspired by symbolist techniques as is the evocation of the effect of emotion rather than the specific emotion itself. "Peindre non la chose, mais l'effet qu'elle produit" (Paint not the thing itself but the effect it produces), wrote Mallarmé as he began his Hérodiade. For Mallarmé, the effect would have increasing importance; he would eventually try to shape poetry that was "about" nothing. For Bogan, the rendering of emotional experience was always paramount. In "The Cupola" she stays with the inner experience. The poem is a way of understanding experience, not an escape from it. For Bogan, then, the distancing technique operates to register tumultuous human emotion, the effects of terrible division and destruction, feelings that could get out of control in the poem (and in her life) without a contained method for expressing them.

Mallarmé's fenêtre/mirror, on the other hand, beckons toward a realm beyond material reality; Bogan's mirror functions to see human emotional experience doubly. Her sense of the interior scene is dominant: this woman poet is not looking out the window (or leaping out of it) to find transcendent reality. Rather, she is very much in the room, a space she has created. Like many women (and not because of nature but due to nature) Bogan had a strong sense of interiors. This is evident from her journals, her short story "Journey Around My Room," and from her own rooms, described by May Sarton. Here she is speaking of the apartment where Bogan lived from 1937 until her death in 1970:

I shall not ever forget walking into the apartment at 137 East 168th Street for the first time, after an all-night drive from Washington. I felt a sharp pang of nostalgia as I walked into that civilized human room, filled with the light of a sensitized, bitter, lucid mind. The impact was so great because not since I walked into Jean Dominique's two rooms above the school in Brussels had I felt so much at home in my inner self. In each instance the habitation reflected in a very special way the tone, the hidden music, as it were, of a woman, and a woman living alone, the sense of a deep loam of experience and taste expressed in the surroundings, the room a shell that reverberated with oceans and tides and waves of the owner's past, the essence of a human life as it had lived itself into certain colors, objets d'art, and especially into many books…. Louise's word for this atmosphere was 'life-enhancing.'

Sarton's prose is richly evocative of the surroundings Bogan created for her work. Out of a sense of domestic interiors, her own emotional experience, the lessons of the modernists and the "negative" examples of her female precursors, Louise Bogan created a poem like "The Cupola."

To summarize, then: Although there is some Mallarmian symbolist influence in the qualities of her verse, content is another matter entirely. Mallarmé disdained the crowd; Baudelaire described life as a hospital in which each of the sick desired only to change beds. This attitude is called "the horror of life" by Roger L. Williams in his study of nineteenth-century French authors. I do not wish to dismiss the great contribution of the French tradition but rather to delineate its limitations for a poet like Louise Bogan whose subject matter came from the center of emotional experience. Not impervious to a certain measure of horror and disgust with existence, she nonetheless kept confronting this attitude and reconnecting with a more complex view of life. As we shall see in the next chapter, her sense of the female gift was inextricably linked to the "heart" that women bring to poetry. It is finally paradoxical that one who inveighed against the female tradition ultimately came to define women's talent in almost stereotypical ways and would in her later career criticize those women poets who tried out "male" modes of expression. But of course a stereotyping of female qualities and a revolt against "female" tradition go hand in hand.

The phrasing of Louise Bogan's response to the Partisan Review inquiry about literary influence gives us a clue about the relative importance of her of the "metaphysical" poets. Her syntax suggests they were not crucial: They were a "fashion," a "literary pattern," wedged between the larger influences, the symbolists and Yeats. It is, in fact, hard to relate Bogan to the tradition of metaphysical poetry in part because she wrote very little about it and because it is difficult to say exactly what is meant by the term. Samuel Johnson first named this seventeenth-century mode in the eighteenth, and T. S. Eliot, in an essay first published in 1921 which Bogan may have read, linked it to modernism in the twentieth. Eliot's essay focuses on the stylistic properties of the metaphysicals and on their capacity for thought. Certainly this model did not function for Bogan in the same way as it did for Eliot, that is, as a way to bring thought into poetry. Her work is more reflective than intellectual and this stance comes out of her own experience. Bogan herself had a rather specific definition of metaphysical. Writing to May Sarton, she noted, "You have a metaphysical bent: you desire the universal behind the apparent; you have a passion for the transcendent" (21 Oct. 1961). Bogan's later meditative poetry asserts connections between the human and the natural world, a philosophy that derives from her own experience of change and time. The "sexual realism" of some of the metaphysicals had an appeal for the moderns, says one commentator: "In its earliest manifestations, it was … distinguished by revolutionary and highly original attitudes toward sexual love…. A new kind of sexual realism, together with an interest in introspective psychological analysis … became an element in the metaphysical fashion." Surely the stylistic influence was most felt by Bogan, the "telescoping of images and multiplied associations," "the brief words and sudden contrasts" that Eliot notes in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets," citing Donne's

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

Bogan's "To a Dead Lover," published in 1922 and later suppressed, begins

      The dark is thrown
      Back from the brightness, like hair
      Cast over a shoulder.

Jeanne Kammer was one of the first to point out that women poets come to modernism by a very different route from men. She leads us to another distinction between Bogan's choice of subject matter and the province of the male poets she so admired. For Kammer, the tight, controlled poems of male modernists "represent both a dramatization of and a withdrawal from a culture fragmented, disordered, and lacking in central values and vision." Kammer writes that if women's poems reflect fragmentation, this is an "internal division … a private experience opposed to the public one of men." Bogan felt that those large questions of the relationship between man and civilization were not her province; only men, in her view, could write about the wasteland. This attitude is another example of her internalization of ideas of woman's role. She seemed to accept the notion that because men are the creators of civilization, because they instigate and fight its wars, they are uniquely qualified to write about this political realm. She made a distinction between the internal world and the external and she felt her subject, even the genuine subject, of art was the internal. In the mid-thirties, during the trauma of the Spanish Civil War and the threat of a second large European conflict, Bogan had terrific fights with her male friends about politics. For her, "politics" was the petty, egotistical fight for power among factions, all of them equally ridiculous. Her own lower middle-class origins had something to do with this attitude: The attempt of intellectuals to save the masses was faintly comic to her. Politics was subsumed under something larger, the movements of History, which had a certain inevitability: "'[H]istory' is itself a stream of energy, is 'generous inconsistency'; and … those who work with it succeed best when they realize this, as the artist always realizes it. It can't be pawed out of shape; it must be listened to, before being acted upon" (7 Oct. 1940). It is art that nourishes the soul: "I know, and knew, that politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred" (To Theodore Roethke, 14 Dec. 1937). She lamented the effect of politics on the poetry of the thirties: "I still think that poetry has something to do with the imagination; I still think it ought to be well-written. I still think it is private feeling, not public speech" (8 July 1938). These attitudes separated her from many of the male poets of her generation as well as from some of the women. H.D., for example, wrote about the effects of war from a female perspective, focusing on its results for personal relationships; her later poetry would dissect patriarchy and male power. H.D. felt as connected to wars of the present and the past, as affected by them, as men. Millay was criticized by Bogan and many others for her political poetry and activism. We are just beginning to learn the extent of the female literary response to the First and Second World War; the more we know, the more Bogan's rejection of this subject matter seems a "female" response and a further example of the limits she set for her work—limits determined in part by her sense of what was possible to a woman poet of her time who wanted immortality through art.

Bogan's conscious confrontations with the tradition forced her to define herself as a poet. She carved out her own subject matter and her own style. Her emotions were so intense that they often threatened to get out of control: she used the modernist aesthetic to provide a form for her strong feelings. "You will remember, I am sure, in dealing with my work, that you are dealing with emotion under high pressure—so that symbols are its only release," she wrote to one interpreter (To Sister M. Angela, 20 Aug. 1966). If modernism was for her a formal strategy for releasing emotion through symbol and compact form, and a way of putting behind her the influences of her early apprenticeship, such as Morris and Rossetti, it did not lead to the "depersonalization" advocated by Eliot. In the fifties, she located her aesthetic between the "depersonalization" of her era and the new confessional modes. Writing to May Sarton, she pointed out that in poetry, "certainly, 'unadulterated life' must be transposed, although it need not be 'depersonalized.' Otherwise you get 'self-expression' only; and that is only half of art." The distinctions between "transpose," "adulterated," and "depersonalized" are subtle indeed and understandable only within the context of Bogan's interpretation of the "male" and "female" traditions of poetry, which we are studying here, and their relationship to her particular talent. For Bogan, emotion is central to the poem but to no avail without skill: "The other half is technical, as well as emotional, and the most poignant poems are those in which the technique takes up the burden of the feeling instantly; and that presupposes a practiced technique …" (To May Sarton, 17 Mar. 1955). Through the poem the poet is unburdened of that weight of emotion. This idea of the burden of emotion is delineated in a short essay called "The Springs of Poetry," which Bogan published in 1923 and which we will consider in chapter 5. The idea is also strikingly similar to one held by Sara Teasdale. This is Teasdale's theory of poetry as she outlined it in 1919:

My theory is that poems are written because of a state of emotional irritation. It may be present for some time before the poet is conscious of what is tormenting him. The emotional irritation springs, probably, from subconscious combinations of partly forgotten thoughts and feelings. Coming together, like electrical currents in a thunderstorm, they produce a poem…. The poem is written to free the poet from an emotional burden. Any poem not so written is only a piece of craftmanship.

Teasdale's emphasis is on the emotion; Bogan, a member of the generation after Teasdale, a modernist, underlines the companionship of craft and feeling.

Bogan, then, felt herself walking a fine line between the two traditions, the female and the male. Because it emphasizes the expression of personal feeling and experience, her work did not fit in with Eliot's pronouncements on "objective poetry"—an aesthetic position that, we should note, had a profound impact on an academic establishment that did not notice Bogan's oeuvre. By the fifties, Bogan had some perspective on other, more extreme manifestations of modern objectivity. Her review of Auroras of Autumn, for example, again makes her point about life in poetry. "[N]o one," she writes of Wallace Stevens, "can describe the simplicities of the natural world with more direct skill. It is a natural world strangely empty of human beings, however; Stevens's men and women are blood less symbols." She feels that his "technique overwhelms the poem: … [T]here is something theatrical in much of his writing; his emotions seem to be transfixed rather than released and projected, by his extraordinary verbal improvisations…." A preoccupation with technique—sometimes a way to escape feeling—prevents the release of emotion into the poem. In this review Bogan laments that many younger poets try to imitate Stevens as though they did not realize that other kinds of modern poetry tap the "transparent, overflowing and spontaneous qualities that Stevens ignores."

Her belief in a poetry based on confrontation with emotional experience would lead her eventually to Rilke. She read him late, in 1935, writing to her editor, "And I've just discovered Rilke. Why did you never tell me about Rilke? My God, the man's wonderful" (To John Hall Wheelock, 1 July 1935). She used his invention of the Ding-Gedichte ("thing-poems") to great advantage in her later poems. His example may have influenced the title poem of The Sleeping Fury, published in 1937. In that year, she wrote that Rilke was the "rare example of the poet who, 'having learned to give himself to what he trusted,' finally 'learned to give himself to what he feared'." Her collections from The Sleeping Fury onward took as epigraph two lines from Rilke:

      Wie ist das klein, womit wir ringen;
      was mit uns ringt, wie is das gross …
 
      (How small is that with which we struggle;
      how great that which struggles with us.)

Louise Bogan's lack of attraction to the more life-denying manifestations of modernism would lead her to feel a greater affinity for Yeats than for Eliot or Stevens. In fact, of all the male influences, Yeats was the most decisive in her early formative years, the only poet writing in English to make such an impact. She read his work early, in 1916, when she was only nineteen, thus four years before the publication of her first volume, Body of This Death (1923). Her collected criticism, A Poet's Alphabet (1970), includes five essays on Yeats; one dating from 1938 is entitled "The Greatest Poet Writing in English Today." The affinity for Yeats came on many levels. His intensity, his lyricism, his song, mirrored her ambitions for poetry. His aesthetic was hers: "a style of speech as simple as the simplest prose, like the cry of the heart. It is not the business of the poet to instruct his age. His business is merely to express himself, whatever that self may be." Singing is a major theme in her work as it is in Yeats; for Bogan, music was almost as essential as breathing. Her writing on rhythm in poetry often relates the rhythm of breath and song. She played the piano and grew up in a "family of singers: my mother and my brother were constantly 'bursting into song.' And I began to study the piano at seven" (To Sister M. Angela, 5 July 1969). Like Yeats, Bogan had to pull herself away from the influences of the Pre-Raphaelites; like his, her poems could be both bitter and proud. Above all, she admired his enduring capacity for trying to understand his experiences and then transmuting them into art. Her attraction was even more profound because of her Irish roots, an identification strengthened by the immigrant's experience of discrimination: "It was borne in upon me, all during my adolescence, that I was a 'mick,' no matter what my other faults or virtues might be." There were enormous differences as well, those that can be attributed both to class and gender. Yeats had an aristocrat's education, first at home and then in private schools. His central political involvements were far from Bogan's experience. Among Bogan's essays on Yeats, her longest focuses on his role in Irish struggles for artistic and political independence; eventually she would express some impatience with the more conservative expressions of his political life. Nor did she, as a woman who internalized social stereotypes of femininity, have such grand poetic ambitions; Yeats "read a special symbolism into all his private acts and relationships," writes M. L. Rosenthal; and, as Edward Engelberg has pointed out in The Vast Design, he developed a complex symbolic system to image his thoughts and feelings. Bogan's aesthetic of limitation decreed that such ambitions were not appropriate to female talent. Moreover, she did not think the idea and argument common to prose was appropriate for lyric poetry. One can find echoes of the early Yeats in early Bogan, in the simplicity of passionate language, even in the melancholy tone; yet she would never use symbol in the way Yeats did in his more philosophical works of the late twenties, after he wrote A Vision. In "The Cupola," for example, the image of the mirror insinuates itself into the poem; Yeats, on the other hand, brought to the poem an authoritative or dominant image inspired by his personal mythic system. In fact, much of the power of his later poetry derives from this assertion of a single image.

So far we have seen that the male tradition is authoritative enough that Louise Bogan claimed it and then went on to both selectively use and discard aspects of it. Before we bring to an end this journey into the authority of male influence, I wish to suggest yet another source of inspiration that Bogan did not mention in her catalogue of influences: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I realize we are now speaking different languages; however, the direct lyricism, the lack of interest in philosophical themes in the early poems, the "romanticism"—these qualities Bogan shared with the German poet. She read him (with the help of a dictionary and translations) early in her career and in 1924, quoting the "Wandrers Nachtlied," she wrote to a friend:

         The stripped, still lyric moves me more, invariably, than any flummery ode
       ever written—although, of course, Keats and the Romantics were only partly
       flummery—but
 
           Über allen Gipfeln
           Ist Ruh
 
       gives me such happiness I want to cry.
 
               (To Rolphe Humphries, 24 July 1924)

Goethe had a remarkable gift for spontaneity—his lyrics are among the most inspired, the most direct and unmediated, I have read. ("Über allen Gipfeln," or so the myth goes, was scrawled in a moment of inspiration on the wall of a mountain hut.) This spontaneity stayed with him all his life. Like Bogan, he was often overwhelmed by Eros, although his love poems tend to be happier than hers and his lyric vein lasted much longer. Bogan worked hard on her German so that she could appreciate its poets. In an essay on Goethe published in 1949, she noted, rightly I think, that he is little appreciated by English-speaking readers because the translations are so poor. For what counts in so many of his lyrics is sound. Bogan suggested that those who do not read German listen to Hugo Wolf's songs based on Goethe's lyrics:

Anyone who has listened to the wild longing of the Wolf-Goethe "Kennst du das Land" or to the noble and transcendent beauty of their "Prometheus" and "Ganymed" has experienced the only world it is important to share with any great poet—the world of his intense emotion and his piercing vision.

Late in her life, this strong affinity for Goethe led to translations of several of his prose works, which she worked on with Elizabeth Mayer. Elective Affinities came out in 1963 and The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novelle in 1971.

What Bogan shares with Goethe, then, is at once a devotion to the formal qualities of art and to intense lyricism, that is, poetry inspired by significant emotional experience. Yet both poets felt they had to learn to check their unrestrained emotions; Goethe's early lyrics are overflowing with passion and energy, and in his middle years, he spoke through Faust of the necessity to rein in emotions that threatened to engulf him. Yet he managed to sing of love in old age, too, in the eloquent lyrics of the Westöstlicher Divan. Ultimately, through Goethe, we realize that Bogan's poetry has as much of a Romantic cast as a modern one. Although he does not link her to Goethe, Harold Bloom some years ago recognized this Romantic heritage:

Louise Bogan is usually categorized as a poet in the metaphysical tradition or meditative mode, following Donne, Emily Dickinson, and older contemporaries like Eliot and Ransom. Yet, like so many modern poets, she is a Romantic in her rhetoric and attitudes…. Miss Bogan is purely a lyrical poet, and lacks the support of the personal systems of Blake and Yeats, by which those poets were able more serenely to contemplate division in the psyche. Miss Bogan is neither a personal mythmaker, in the full Romantic tradition, like her near contemporary Hart Crane, nor an ironist in the manner of Tate, to cite another poet of her generation. The honesty and passion of her best work has about it, in consequence, a vulnerable directness.

The last line of this 1958 evaluation echoes Bogan's point of view in her essay on the female poetic gift, "The Heart and the Lyre" (1947), which I shall discuss in the next chapter. Bloom at once underlines Bogan's specialness as he places her within a part of the male tradition that she did not count, whether consciously or unconsciously, as "influence." Bloom's is one of the few critical evaluations before the new feminist criticism that came close to an accurate assessment of Bogan's place in Anglo-American poetry. His last line opens the way to a consideration of gender and poetry—although Bloom is not conscious of this possibility.

Louise Bogan manipulated the white male tradition to her advantage: By studying and using modernism's lessons, she put herself within the reigning tradition. This was only half of her task; the other was to dissociate herself from the prevailing stereotype of the woman poet, that image of the wailing and uncontrollable poetess of the nineteenth century. Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert have pointed out that the woman artist "must confront precursors who are almost exclusively male, and therefore significantly different from her…. On the one hand,… the woman writer's male precursors symbolize authority; on the other hand, despite their authority, they fail to define the ways in which she experiences her identity as a writer." Bogan used what she could from the male tradition but it had its limits for her, as it does for any woman, since the emotional experience that goes into the poem is the experience of a woman.