[Limmer is an editor who compiled Bogan's A Poet's Alphabet and What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920–1970. The following is Bogan's response to a questionnaire that was submitted to a number of American writers; it was originally published in the Partisan Review in Fall 1939. Bogan comments on her writing, literary criticism, and American society.]

[Limmer]: Are you conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a "usable past"? Is this mostly American? What figures would you designate as elements in it? Would you say, for example, that Henry James's work is more relevant to the present and future of American writing than Walt Whitman's?

[Bogan]: 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 not very nutritious. But my "classical" education was severe, and I read Latin prose and poetry and Xenophon and the Iliad, during my adolescence. 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, and I never drew any refreshment from his "thought." Henry James I discovered late, and I read him for the first time with the usual prejudices against him, absorbed from the inadequate criticism he has generally received. It was not until I had developed some independent critical judgment that I recognized him as a great and subtle artist. If civilization and great art mean complexity rather than simplification, and if the humane can be defined as the well understood because the well-explored, James' work is certainly more relevant to American writing, present and future, than the naive vigor and sentimental "thinking" of Whitman.

Do you think of yourself as writing for a definite audience? If so, how would you describe this audience? Would you say that the audience for serious American writing has grown or contracted in the last ten years?

I have seldom thought about a definite "audience" for my poetry, and I certainly have never believed that the wider the audience, the better the poetry. Poetry had a fairly wide audience during what was roughly known as the "American poetic renaissance." It has been borne in upon me, in the last ten years, that there are only a few people capable of the aesthetic experience, and that, in this group, some persons who are able to appreciate "form" in the graphic arts, cannot recognize it in writing, just as there are writers who cannot "hear" music, or "see" painting. This small element in the population remains, it seems to me, more or less constant, and penetrates class distinctions. People may be led up to the threshold of the aesthetic experience, and taught its elements and its value, but I have never seen a person in whom the gift was not native actually experience the "shock of recognition" which a poem (or any work of art) gives its appreciator. And it is individuals to whom the aesthetic experience is closed, or those who know what it is, but wish to load it with a misplaced weight of "meaning" (and it seems incredible that such people as the last named exist; it is one of the horrors of life that they do)—it is such people who think that this experience can be "used."—Certainly the audience for the disinterested and the gratuitous in writing was never very large, in America. The layer of American "culture" has always been extremely thin. And it has not deepened in itself, but has been subject to fashions hastily imposed upon it. And the American "cultural" background is thick with ideas of "success" and "morality." So a piece of writing which is worth nothing, and means nothing (but itself) is, to readers at large, silly and somewhat immoral. "Serious writing" has come to mean, to the public, the pompous or thinly documentary. The truly serious piece of work, where a situation is explored at all levels, disinterestedly, for its own sake, is outlawed.

Do you place much value on the criticism your work has received? Would you agree that the corruption of the literary supplements by advertising—in the case of the newspapers—and political pressures—in the case of the liberal weeklies—has made serious literary criticism an isolated cult?

No.—The corruption of the literary supplements is nearly complete, but who would expect it to be otherwise, when publishers admit that they are selling packaged goods, for the most part: that their products, on the whole, stand on the same level as cigarettes and whiskey, as sedatives and pain-killers?—I have written criticism for liberal weeklies and can testify that in the case of one of them, no pressure of any kind has ever been put upon me. I have also been left perfectly free by a magazine which makes no claim to be anything but amusing…. Serious criticism is, now in America, seriously hampered by the extraordinarily silly, but really (on the sentimental public at large), amazingly effective under-cover methods of certain pressure groups. But if there is no one who has the good sense to see the difference between warmed-over party tracts and actual analysis—if the public swallows such stuff whole—perhaps that is what the public deserves. Perhaps there is a biological bourgeoisie, thick headed and without sensibilities, thrown up into every generation, as well as an economic one. I discovered, long ago, that there are human attributes the gods themselves, as some one has said, cannot war against, and some of them are stupidity, greed, vanity, and arrogance.

Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, and without the aid of such crutches as teaching and editorial work? Do you think there is any place in our present economic system for literature as a profession?

I have never been able to make a living by writing poetry and it has never entered my mind that I could do so. I think the place in our present American set-up for the honest and detached professional writer is both small and cold. (But then, it was both small and cold for…. Flaubert, in 19th century France.)

Do you find, in retrospect, that your writing reveals any allegiance to any group, class, organization, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual?

My writing reveals some "allegiances" (if this term means certain marks made upon it by circumstance). I was brought up in the Roman Catholic Church, and was exposed to real liturgy, instead of the dreary "services" and the dreadful hymnody of the Protestant churches. There was a Celtic gift for language, and talent in the form of a remarkable excess of energy, on the maternal side of my family. And I was handed out, as I have said, a thorough secondary classical education, from the age of twelve through the age of seventeen, in the public schools of Boston. I did not know I was a member of a class until I was twenty-one; but I knew I was a member of a racial and religious minority, from an early age. One of the great shocks of my life came when I discovered that bigotry existed not only among the Catholics, but among the Protestants, whom I had thought would be tolerant and civilized (since their pretentions were always in that direction). 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. It took me a long time to take this fact easily, and to understand the situation which gave rise to the minor persecutions I endured at the hands of supposedly educated and humane people.—I came from the white collar class and it was difficult to erase the dangerous tendencies—the impulse to "rise" and respect "nice people"—of this class. These tendencies I have wrung out of my spiritual constitution with a great deal of success. I am proud to say.—Beyond these basic influences, I think of my writing as the expression of my own development as an individual.

How would you describe the political tendency of American writing as a whole since 1930? How do you feel about it yourself? Are you sympathetic to the current tendency towards what may be called "literary nationalism"—a renewed emphasis, largely uncritical, on the specifically "American elements in our culture?

The political tendency of American writing since 1930 is, I believe, more symptomatic of a spiritual malaise than is generally supposed. Granted that the economic crisis became grave; it is nevertheless peculiar and highly symptomatic that intellectuals having discovered that "freedom" is not enough, and does not automatically lead to depth of insight and peace of mind, threw over every scrap of their former enthusiasms, as though there were something sinful in them. The economic crisis occurred when that generation of young people was entering the thirties; and, instead of fighting out the personal ills attendant upon the transition from youth to middle age, they took refuge in closed systems of belief, and automatically (many of them) committed creative suicide…. "Literary nationalism" has valuable elements in it; it opened the eyes of writers, superficially at least, to conditions which had surrounded them from childhood, but which they had spent much effort "escaping." But when this nationalism took a fixed form (when it became more fashionable to examine the situation of the share-cropper, for example, than the situation of slum-dwellers in Chelsea, Massachusetts, or Newark, New Jersey) its value dwindled. And the closing of one foreign culture after another, to the critical and appreciative examination of students, is one deplorable result of thinking in purely political terms. Any purely chauvinistic enthusiasm is, of course, always ridiculous.

This is the place, perhaps, to state my belief that the true sincerity and compassion which humane detachment alone can give, are necessary before the writer can pass judgment upon the ills of his time. To sink oneself into a party is fatal, no matter how noble the tenets of that party may be. For all tenets tend to harden into dogma, and all dogma breeds hatred and bigotry, and is therefore stultifying. And the condescension of the political party toward the artist is always clear, however well disguised. The artist will be "given" his freedom; as though it were not the artist who "gives" freedom to the world, and not only "gives" it, but is the only person capable of enduring it, or of understanding what it costs. The artists who remain exemplars have often, it is true, become entangled in politics, but it is not their political work which we remember. Nonsense concerning the function of the arts has been tossed about for centuries. Art has been asked, again, as the wind changed, to be "romantic," "filled with sensibility," "classic," "useful," "uplifting" and whatnot. The true artist will instinctively reject "burning questions" and all "crude oppositions" which can cloud his vision or block his ability to deal with his world. All this has been fought through before now;…. Turgenev showed up the pretentions of the political critic Belinsky; Flaubert fought the battle against "usefulness" all his life; Yeats wrote the most superb anti-political poetry ever written. Flaubert wrote, in the midst of one bad political period: "Let us [as writers] remain the river and turn the mill."

Have you considered the question of your attitude towards the possible entry of the United States into the next world war? What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are when and if war comes?

In the event of another war, I plan to oppose it with every means in my power. The responsibilities of writers in general, I should think, lie in such active opposition.