Louise Bogan and Léonie Adams
[An American educator, critic, and poet, Olson is a prominent member of what has been called the neo-Aristotelian school, which emerged at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Members of this group share the belief that the principles set down by Aristotle in his Poetics can be applied to contemporary literature, thereby allowing a critic to determine the composite effect of a literary work through analysis of its differentiable artistic parts such as plot, character, thought, diction. In the following excerpt from an essay that was originally published in 1954 in the Chicago Review, Olson asserts that Bogan successfully conveys emotion through compact, unadorned verse.]
The greater part of Miss Bogan's poems [in Collected Poems: 1923–1953] deal with the experiences of love; love, that is, as suffered by a certain individual. Like many other lyric poets, Bogan tends to portray a single character who appears constantly, or nearly so, in her work; whether this character is the poet or a dramatic figment, whether her experiences are real or imagined, it would be impertinent, and indeed pointless, to inquire. What is to the point is that this character is of a certain order, and that her experiences, as suggested by the individual poems, tend to follow a certain pattern. The character is a woman, sensitive, passionate, sensuous, and, I should say, strong-willed; intelligent, but emotional rather than intellectual; led against her reason, almost against her will, into love; loving violently and prodigal in her love, but quick to resent any betrayal or any attempt at domination by her lover. For her, love is neither a merging of two into one such as we see in Donne's "The Ecstasy," nor the ensouling of woman by man, nor of man by woman; it is a conjunction of two distinct persons, the essential condition of which is that, as conjoined, they should remain distinct. It is neither love wholly spiritualized, nor merely physical attraction. It is likely to be transitory, not because romantic conventions demand that it should be so, but because the difficult conditions of its existence cannot be long maintained. Like romantic love, it has its pleasures and pains, but these are not always alternations of rapture with anguish; they remain pretty much life-size.
For such a woman, the history of love is almost bound to follow a certain course; there are, thus, poems which express intense desire, or bitter resistance to it; delight, not merely with love itself, but with life as transformed by love; resignation, pain, bitterness, or regret as love ends. This course seems to grow out of the conflict between selfhood and love, and special emotions are generated as now one triumphs, now the other; significantly, love is often seen in the poems in terms of war, with its wounds, surrenders, victories, and scars, or of some natural force raging beyond control, or else of some thralldom or bitterly resented enchantment, some "bitter spell" that must be suffered.
This may remind some instantly of Millay; but in fact there is very little, if any, resemblance. In Millay, when the woman is not simply "feminine" in the sense of whimsical, fickle, impulsive, and so on, she is supposedly of divine or heroic mold; and the whole history of love is similarly magnified and exaggerated. The fates are involved, the fortunes of nations hang in the balance, the gods watch or even intervene, the lover is not a man but a god, love makes the woman godlike, too, or at any rate comparable to Danae, Europa, Leda, and others who "had a god for guest." All pain is insupportable agony; all pleasure is transcendent ecstasy. (Lest it be supposed that I exaggerate this, look at sonnets I, IV, V, VII, XII, XIV, XV, XVI, XXVI, XLII, LII of Fatal Interview.) Millay sought to give the love she described something of tragic stature by equating it with the great loves of myth and legend; she failed, I think, because in her poems we are told rather than shown that the love is of so exalted an order. It is one thing to claim that you are suffering as much as Othello or Lear; quite another to be what they are, and suffer such anguish as they do.
Miss Bogan never attempts this tragic or epic strain. She shows us a human being suffering perfectly human, if violent, passions; lovers are brought together or separated, not by the Fates or Cupid or Aphrodite, but by the course of nature; the love depicted is not that of Iseult or Dido, but love as most of us know it; we see the events, not against any romantic background, but in perfectly ordinary, if vivid, settings—chiefly New England countryside; and what happens is important because of the individuals concerned, not because of any greater consequences.
We must beware of reading independent lyric poems as if they made up a novel. Miss Bogan's poems, for instance, are independent lyrics, and they nearly always depict a single moment of passion or thought. But poems which deal with a moment may or may not deal with it as involved in a context of other events. In the case of Herrick's "Whenas in silks my Julia goes," for example, we never dream of asking in what particular circumstances the lover spoke, or of asking what happened before or after; the moment is separated from all circumstance and from any other event. Miss Bogan's poems sometimes deal, similarly, with the isolated moment; more characteristically, however, they imply a context of events; and it is that context which I am attempting to suggest here. Moreover, I should say that she scores special triumphs by selecting, not the moment when affairs themselves are at a crisis, but the moment which makes its context most significant and intelligible. I have a distinction in mind which a single example may make clear. Think of "Porphyria's Lover." Browning had the choice of depicting a moment of crisis, say the strangulation of Porphyria, or the moment when the whole course of events could best be manifested and contemplated; quite different effects must follow, of course, as one or the other is shown, though in any case the tale must be one of violent emotions. Hardly anyone would doubt, I think, that Browning gets a particular effect by showing the lover, serene and mad, holding his strangled mistress in his arms as if she were still alive, and musing calmly on what has happened. Passions do not rage to the point of murder in Miss Bogan's poems, but she does similarly select the comprehensive rather than the climactic.
I have been speaking of what she depicts; the manner in which she depicts it serves to heighten and reinforce the characteristics of her subject. She tends to be reticent as to what is happening or what has happened, while at the same time she sets forth the attendant circumstances in vivid detail. That reticence she manages in various ways; her character speaks with all the assumptions consequent upon shared experience, as in "Old Countryside," or makes guarded references to what has happened, as in "For a Marriage," or interprets something as only a person who has suffered devastating passion would interpret it, as in "Feuer-Nacht," or uses a narrative technique which simply does not tell all it might, as in "The Changed Woman."
The consequence is that the personages of these poems appear to us as they might by a lightning-flash, or as they might be glimpsed from a swift train; they are caught in attitudes obviously significant, which we cannot interpret; they make gestures passionate but mysterious. In "Porphyria's Lover," Browning tells us what happened; Bogan hints. But the setting, the whole circumstantial periphery of action, is shown with great vividness; the sharp images compel our imagination and our belief; the reticent and yet pregnant method of representation forces us to wonder and conjecture; and a part of the inexhaustible fascination of these poems surely resides in the fact that no conjecture fully satisfies us. Her poems are like pictures of scenes from some passionate and bitter play which we have not seen: the decor is brilliantly clear; the characters are fixed in poses which betray much, if only we could interpret.
"Old Countryside" is a perfect example of this method:
Beyond the hour we counted rain that fell
On the slant shutter, all has come to proof.
The summer thunder, like a wooden bell,
Rang in the storm above the mansard roof.
And mirrors cast the cloudy day along
The attic floor; wind made the clapboards creak.
You braced against the wall to make it strong,
A shell against your cheek.
Long since, we pulled brown oak-leaves to the ground
In a winter of dry trees; we heard the cock
Shout its unplaceable cry, the axe's sound
Delay a moment after the axe's stroke.
Far back, we saw, in the stillest of the year,
The scrawled vine shudder, and the rose-branch show
Red to the thorns, and, sharp as sight can bear,
The thin hound's body arched against the snow.
Here the physical circumstances are as clear as possible; but what is the further history which is hinted at in "all has come to proof? Perhaps only the growth of love; perhaps more.
"A Packet of Letters" is less concerned with circumstance, but is charged with bitter mystery:
In the shut drawer, even now, they rave and grieve—
To be approached at times with the frightened tear;
Their cold to be drawn away from, as one, at nightfall,
Draws the cloak closer against the cold of the marsh.
There, there, the thugs of the heart did murder.
There, still in murderers' guise, two stand embraced, embalmed.
Again, in one of her best and longest poems, the extraordinary "Summer Wish":
Indeed, she can imply a whole history of terror and pain in a line or so:
Never, for them, the dark turreted house reflects itself
In the depthless stream.
Her images range over all kinds of feelings. Here are a few samples of her visual imagery. First, from "Statue and Birds":
The birds walk by slowly, circling the marble girl,
The golden quails,
The pheasants, closed up in their arrowy wings,
Dragging their sharp tails.
From "Winter Swan":
Here, to the ripple cut by the cold, drifts this
Bird, the long throat bent back, and the eyes in hiding.
From "Summer Wish":
The cloud shadow flies up the bank, but does not
Blow off like smoke. It stops at the bank's edge.
In the field by trees two shadows come together.
The trees and the cloud throw down their shadow upon
The man who walks there. Dark flows up from his feet
To his shoulders and throat, then has his face in its mask,
Then lifts.
And from "The Flume," a remarkable narrative poem which she does not include in her Collected Poems:
At night his calm, closed body lay beside her …
Her hair sweeps over his shoulder, claiming
him hers…
She is as brilliant in depicting other sensations:
Here is a tremendous auditory image, from "A Letter," which I believe she has not reprinted since her first book:
These images are striking even in isolation, because of the perceptions which they record. In one way, as I have just said, they are quite various; in another, they are all of a single kind. Images can be classified according as they give us the unmodified perception or the perception as modified by the state and circumstance of the perceiver. Miss Bogan limits herself, I think almost entirely, to the first kind; she gives the object simply, "as it is"—that is, as any good perceiver, unaffected by emotion or a particular point of view, would see it; and as a consequence she builds up a very real and solid world to serve as the theater of her brief and poignant dramas. Any reader of Defoe knows how circumstantiality produces belief; conviction is even greater when the circumstance is rendered in a vivid image.
Imagery of this order has to be an "accurate" depiction of the object; Miss Bogan is accurate to the point where her images seem to deal with permanent and inalienable aspects of the objects, and to do so definitively; one has the feeling that, whatever else might be said about the objects, these things must be said, and that it would be difficult if not impossible to say anything further about them, in this objective fashion. For example, she speaks of
the pillared harp, sealed to its rest by hands—
(On the bright strings the hands are almost reflected, The strings a mirror and light.)
After that, I submit, it is a little hard to say anything more about harps.
She does not merely choose the salient and "essential" characteristics, however; she chooses those which in addition imply other characteristics, and thus she effects wonders with a few strokes. Look at that winter swan again; it is not merely a swan, but a whole season seen in terms of a swan. Or see how, in two lines of "Hypocrite Swift," she conveys the silence, the immobility, the spaciousness, the chill and formal elegance, even the eerie loneliness of a scene:
On walls at court, long gilded mirrors gaze.
The parquet shines; outside, the snow falls deep.
Since she deals with experiences which we all have, seen clearly and without exaggeration and distortion, she usually avoids figurative language, and remains perfectly literal; when she does use metaphor, it is with telling force. In the lines just quoted, "gaze" is the only metaphor; but it gives us immediately an impression of fixity, of still brightness untroubled by reflected motion, over a long period of time. "The parquet shines"; and "shines" echoes that notion; we get the impression that the mirrors reflect the parquet, the parquet reflects the mirrors; there is nothing else, except that, dumbly, "outside, the snow falls deep." No presence, no sound, no motion—not so much as a candle's flickering—in the chambers, though our view has ranged from ceilings to floors with the word "long" and along the floors with the word "shines." When we see a place once noisy and crowded, now vacant and silent, an eeriness comes over us; the more spacious it is, the more crowded with tokens of its former busyness, the sharper the feeling; that is why, I think, we feel it so keenly here. In short, late winter night in the eighteenth century, in a palace, complete in all essentials; expressed in sixteen words.
Her style is generally plain, terse, bare to the point of austerity, seldom involving uncommon words or constructions; we are not likely to notice this because of the absorbing thing she does with it. When we do notice it, we are likely to conclude hastily that hers is simply the style of common speech. This is not quite the case; indeed, she achieves some startling feats by using a common word, literally and apparently in its usual sense, and yet with extraordinary force. A single example must serve here. "Mix" is surely a common enough word; few would suppose, offhand, that it could be used to much poetic effect, let alone for a whole variety of effects. But look what she can do with it:
A mirror hangs on the wall of the draughty cupola,
Within the depths of the glass mix the oak and the beech leaf….
The crafty knight in the game, with its mixed move …
Dream the mixed, fearsome dream.
In brief: Bogan is a poet of the violent emotions; she depicts with severe economy, with reticence and by implication; her images are "objective," and her language is plain and natural.
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