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"My Scourge, My Sister': Louise Bogan's Muse

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SOURCE: '"My Scourge, My Sister': Louise Bogan's Muse," in Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, edited by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, The University of Michigan Press, 1985, pp. 92–104.

[In the following essay, DeShazer examines the inspiration and defining qualities of Bogan's poetic voice.]

"What makes a writer?" Louise Bogan asks in a lecture given at New York University during the 1960s. Rejecting the "purist" notion of a passionate love for the act of writing in itself, she explores such contributing factors as intellectual power, talent, and, in particular, "gift."

It is a gift that I prefer to think of it. The ancients personified the giver of the gift as the Muse—or the Muses: the Daughters of Memory. The French use the word souffle figuratively for what passes between the Muse and the artist or writer—le souffle du génie—the breath of inspiration; and any writer worth his salt has felt this breath. It comes and goes; it cannot be forced and it can very rarely be summoned up by the conscious will.

This passage reflects the importance for Bogan of the muse as a metaphor for poetic creativity, a concern she shares with many other modern women poets. Furthermore, the language of the quotation suggests that peculiar brand of creative ambivalence, the problem of reconciling one's poetic identity with one's gender, which often permeates the woman poet's struggle for autonomous expression. Traditionally the writer, especially the poet, has been assumed to be male: a prophet, a priest, an Orphic bard who sings eloquently and forcefully to and for those less gifted. The muse, on the other hand, has typically been personified as female, an inspiring "other" imaged as the male poet's beneficent maternal helpmate, his seductive, elusive beloved, or a combination of the two. For Bogan as for other women poets, this paradigm does not hold, yet she finds that tradition offers no alternative. Unable or unwilling here to speak directly from her frame of reference as a woman poet—to say, that is, "any writer worth her salt"—she is equally hesitant to attribute a specific sex to the muse. The poetic gift is "the breath of inspiration," "it," and the issue of who or what may be the source of this gift is not directly addressed.

Yet Bogan is aware of the problematic nature of the relationship between woman poet and muse. Despite the improved status of women effected by the modern feminist movement, she asserts,

the problem of the woman artist remains unchanged. Henry James in The Tragic Muse speaks of "that oddest of animals, the writer who happens to be a woman." Robert Graves has more recently said that women poets have a distinctly difficult problem, since they must be their own Muse.

Bogan does not discuss the implications of these remarks, choosing instead to analyze the various powers and terrors attributed through the ages to woman in her roles as goddess, mother, wife, and lover; thus the questions she raises here remain unanswered. Who or what does Bogan perceive as her inspirational source? And is Graves's assertion that the woman poet must be her own muse applicable to Louise Bogan?

Like women poets from Sappho to Emily Dickinson to Adrienne Rich, Bogan invokes a muse very different from that of her male counterparts. For Bogan, the muse emerges as a female figure whom she "re-visions" and remythologizes as an active rather than a passive inspirational force, a powerful alternate "self rather than an externalized, objectified "other." Often Bogan images the muse as a demonic goddess with whom she must wrestle and yet through whom her own powers of creativity are given rise, to take shape in a perverse but potent language and voice. This fascination with a demonic muse, along with a tendency to redefine the "monster" within as a source of creative nurture and sustenance, reflects a paradox inherent in Bogan's poetry and poetics: an intense conflict over her own artistic powers, and yet a keen desire for poetic subjectivity and strength.

For Bogan, then, this issue of the poet-muse relationship is an extremely complex matter closely connected to her ambivalence toward both her womanhood and her art—or her "craft," as Bogan, with her emphasis on technique and poetic process, might prefer. "Craft" suggests this poet's preoccupation with the formal and linguistic elements of poetry, as well as her "crafty" aesthetic strategy of employing female personae as distancing or masking devices. Through a process of dissociation she creates guises and images which let her conceal her central poetic concerns at the same time she reveals them, thereby producing what she describes in one poem as "terrible, dissembling music." In a letter to Morton Zabel, Bogan claims that the poet must opt for "reticence" but not "guardedness," but the difference to which she alludes is often difficult to distinguish in her own work. Like many women poets, Bogan experiences the conflict of the "double bind": how to function successfully as both woman and poet in a culture which considers the two a contradiction in terms. Her poems are filled with images of fragmentation, division, things "riven," to use a favorite Bogan adjective; her strategies for coping with this conflict are suggested in an imagery of rage, solitude, and, finally, silence: an isolation fraught with despair and anger, which culminates in her prevalent metaphor of the silent voice. Yet from this silent voice emerges a paradoxically powerful speech, one informed by an inspirational source born of the poet's own female experience and creative energies. Ultimately it is from a female perspective that Bogan creates her "aesthetic of silence" [so termed by Jeanne Kammer in "The Art of Silence and the Forms of Women's Poetry," Shakespeare's Sisters, Gilbert and Gubar, eds., 1979], and it is as a female force both demonic and benevolent that she perceives and personifies the giver of her gift, the muse: "my scourge, my sister" ["The Sleeping Fury"].

Bogan's female muse often emerges from a rubric of silence, which she employs as a metaphor for the female artistic struggle. Many poems about the creative process contain at least one central image of silence or thwarted speech.

  • People without palates trying to utter, and the trap seems to close.
  • Must I tell again / In the words I know … ?
  • This mouth will yet know song / And words move on this tongue.
  • A smothered sound … long lost within lost deeps.
  • Still it is good to strive … to echo the shout and the stammer.
  • Hearing at one time … / that checked breath bound to the mouth and caught / Back to the mouth, closing its mocking speech….
  • And it is my virtue … that it is silences which comes from us.

Similar lines appear in other Bogan poems, and an imagery of silence or aborted speech informs the various renderings of the poet's female muse. Why does Bogan insist upon this perverse imagery which asserts even as it denies her poetic power?

Silence is hardly a new poetic image; indeed, textual silence—the absence of dialogue, the presence of elliptical, cacophonous speech—serves as a key metaphor in modern literature. In his discussion of silence as a central mode of expression, if not a raison d'être, in modern and postmodern works, Ihab Hassan asserts [in the introduction to The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett, 1967] that it is a "sense of outrage" which induces literary silence, "a metaphysical revolt and at the same time metaphysical surrender, which is the desire for nothingness." Hassan views this tendency toward negation as a paradoxically healthy sign, "a new attitude that literature has chosen to adopt toward itself as a means of challenging traditional assumptions, and he offers an interesting argument that the metaphor of poetic silence parallels and extends the myth of Orpheus in a context applicable to the modern poet. Faced with existential despair and the possibility of annihilation, Hassan asserts, the modern poet must speak from a severed head; only by directly confronting his own fragmentation and the volatile nature of his world can he continue to sing. I use the generic "he" deliberately, for although Hassan's analysis does not specifically exclude women writers, his focus is primarily on male writers, his assumptions about the artist's sex and nature those of traditional patriarchal literature and scholarship.

[In Silences, 1979] Tillie Olsen offers a different perspective on the significance of silence for the woman writer, for whom it has traditionally been an obstacle to overcome, "the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot." Olsen is especially interested in Louise Bogan, and although she does not analyze Bogan's use of an imagery of silence, she does speculate about why this "consummate poet" wrote so little. Olsen views Bogan's passion for perfection as a compensatory mania which, she believes, often consumes women writers, who feel stigmatized by their gender and thus make excessive demands of themselves. Citing a letter in which Bogan describes her own critical bent as "the knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life," Olsen concludes that this poet represents "one of our most grievous 'hidden silences.'"

Both Hassan's and Olsen's analyses are relevant to the issue of silence as a prominent metaphor in Bogan's poetry, but neither accounts completely for the use of silence as a strategy in women's art. Like many other writers, Bogan uses silence as a means of transforming the liabilities of isolation and fragmentation into assets. But, as Olsen suggests, Bogan's search for voice is not merely that of the typical modern poet confronting the existential void, but rather that of the modern woman poet experiencing the predicament of gender alienation as well. Remote from the enterprise of poetry due to her sex and her time, she frequently responds to this isolation by setting inordinately high artistic standards and writing little, thus isolating herself still further by her self-imposed demands for perfection. Furthermore, she cannot deny her womanhood; thus her fear that her voice will be viewed by others as less "universal" than that of her male counterparts causes her to become her own harshest critic. She not only "consents to [her own] dismemberment" [Ihab Hassan, Introduction to The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward Post-modern Literature, 1971], she actively participates in it. This is not to suggest a masochism at work, however, for the woman writer typically dismembers in order to reconstruct. Once the old stance is broken down, she starts to "re-member" on her own terms, and by her own means. For Louise Bogan, one such means of "re-membering" is a perverse and stony silence which, ironically, provides a strong voice from which to speak. This silence is neither Hassan's "desire for nothingness" nor Olsen's "atrophy," but rather a singular response to the woman poet's quest for autonomous expression, a means by which she can both reveal and conceal her powerful poetic voice.

Bogan is not alone among women poets in adopting this strategy of the silent voice. In "The Art of Silence and the Forms of Women's Poetry," Jeanne Kammer discusses the tendency among a number of women poets—notably Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Marianne Moore—to use silence as a means of both expressing and denying their gender-related frustrations. Chief among the characteristics of "expression-suppression" is what Kammer, borrowing the term from Philip Wheelwright, calls "diaphoric" metaphor: a type of linguistic and imagistic compression characterized by paradox, ellipsis, syntactic inversion, complex sentence embeddings, and ironic juxtaposition of two or more concrete images. Although Kammer goes on to note that diaphor is a trait of much modern poetry, she argues that the source of this aesthetic choice is unique for the woman poet. Her feelings of cultural powerlessness, her realization that the bardic "epiphoric" voice is not hers, leads her to diaphor.

Silence for Bogan is an aesthetic strategy functioning within the framework of the diaphoric mode. As a method of confrontation with world, art, and self, silence becomes a potent and dynamic strategy of subversion for Bogan and ultimately a central tenet of her art. Silence is necessary for self-apotheosis for Bogan, and the metaphor of the still voice reflects her creative ambivalence and her demonic and benevolent sides. This use of silence is particularly well illustrated in poems about the female muse, those which celebrate the goddess as a source of poetic energy. The line "it is silence which comes from us," then, reveals Bogan's view of the source of her inspiration, the "us" within, and suggests a key image by which she depicts that inspirational force. For Bogan, "the loud sound and pure silence fall as one" ["Sonnet"].

As her "aesthetic of silence" indicates, Bogan both fears and thrives on her creative strength. Female figures serve as muses in her poems, alternate selves at once sources and manifestations of the poet's struggle with herself for herself. These female figures provide artistic nourishment and sustenance which help Bogan come to terms with "that crafty demon and that loud beast," the demonic side of herself. Bogan's muses are often mythological women, goddesses of vengeance and power who reflect her efforts to depict her creative struggle through the framework of a female-centered mythology. That Bogan recognizes the strong symbolic link between the woman poet and the goddesses of antiquity is indicated in "What the Women Said," an essay in which she explores the beneficent and demonic nature of ancient female figures such as Cybele, "mother of all the gods," Isis, Kali, Plato's Diotima, and Athene. Despite this celebration of mythological women as both "vocal and visible," however, Bogan often portrays her gift from these inspirational forces not as a bardic song but as a Sphinxlike silence, a voice befitting the quiet, solitary, yet paradoxically powerful female whom she envisions. As I have suggested, Bogan's silent voice is a strategy by which she attains poetic power and yet acknowledges the problems inherent in doing so. In this regard she anticipates those contemporary French theorists who regard silence as one of the woman writer's most revolutionary means of self-expression, a key tool in her rebellion against a male-dominated language and literature. One such critic, Hélène Cixous, argues [in La Jeune Née, 1975] that to symbolize her search for a female language, the woman writer should use an indelible and invisible white ink, thereby creating a hermetic inscription out of "mother's milk." This new "script" would symbolize her alienation from the patriarchy and her community with other female forgers of new truths. Although Bogan would perhaps not have advocated the use of white ink to symbolize female creativity, she uses a similar image in the "Meadow Milk" of "The Crossed Apple"; furthermore, in poems which focus on mythological women as sources of power, she uses silence as a tool similar to Cixous's "white ink." The absence of speech that is present, like the invisibility of an ink which flows, represents women's paradoxial "repressed expression"—her gift of silent speech, born of a female muse. Alongside silence as a dominant image is solitude, which Bogan depicts as a companion-source of creative nourishment, a way by which the female quester can attain the freedom of one whose "body hears no echo save its own" [Sonnet]. Silence and solitude, then, are the central images of her three most revealing muse-poems.

A solitary silence is implicit in the fate and voice of Cassandra, the female prophet of Greek mythology punished by Zeus for insubordination by being awarded a gift of prophecy to which no one would listen. In "Cassandra" Bogan treats the plight of this female figure as a metaphor for that of woman poet:

To me, one silly task is like another.
I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride.
This flesh will never give a child its mother,—
Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again. I am the chosen no hand saves:
The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.

Cassandra's stance as a female prophet dissociated from other women and from other prophets parallels Bogan's view of herself as a woman poet, alienated from other women and their "silly tasks" as well as from male poets. Like Cassandra, doomed by her own plaintive cry, the poet is isolated by her poetic gift, at once a debilitating and an empowering force. Neither the poet nor Cassandra chooses her gift of isolation, and both are ambivalent toward this power imposed by forces beyond their control. Cassandra's song literally attacks her, tearing through her breast and side; its source, madness, overwhelms its unwilling victim again and again. Ironically, then, both strength and weakness lie at the root of Cassandra's gift of prophecy. She is chosen for divinity yet not saved from suffering, empowered with song but ignored by all. Yet from this same song she derives her power.

Cassandra's mad, screaming voice provides a significant contrast to the deliberate predictions of other prophets from mythology—the blind Tiresias, for example, or Isaiah. Instead, her warnings might be likened to those of the oracle of Delphi, whose riddled prophecies often went unheeded because their complexity defied mortal interpretation. Cassandra's plight and its attendant powers recall the conflict which Bogan describes in "The Daemon," as the poet is forced to recount repeatedly "the word … the flesh, the blow" to "the lot who little bore." Clearly Bogan perceives herself as a modern version of Cassandra, plagued and yet empowered by an insistent muse to speak not in a bardic voice, but in an oracular one. In Cassandra," Bogan shrieks her seer's truths through the potent voice of a woman twice disenfranchised: by the madness which "chooses out my voice again, / Again," and by the alienating yet restorative silence which receives her unheeded cries, turning them back upon themselves.

Silence also forms the core of "Medusa," a poem in which Bogan directly confronts her own demonic aspect in the guise of the terrifying Gorgon, who according to classical myth turns onlookers into stone. Rather than being a totally debilitating encounter, however, this confrontation enables the poet to assume some of Medusa's frozen, silent power. The poem begins with a description of the awesome meeting, which occurs in a "house, in a cave of trees," under a "sheer sky." As the poet encounters Medusa, a whirlwind carries the reflection of house, trees, and sky into the poet's range of vision. This image of reflection is especially crucial, since according to legend the Gorgon's hideous face must be viewed only indirectly, lest the observer be petrified with fright and cast into stone. Significantly, however, the poet confronts the "bare eyes" and "hissing hair" directly. This act of boldness recalls the male quester of another Bogan poem, "A Tale," who finds endurance only "where something dreadful and another / Look quietly upon each other"; and it also anticipates later poems such as "March Twilight," in which a watcher gazes into "another face," only to see "time's eye"; or "Little Lobelia's Song," whose childlike speaker sees reflected in her own face the image of a potent other. As these other poems suggest, this eye-to-eye encounter between speaker and "shadow," that other self both frightening and recognizable, is crucial to Bogan's poetic imagery and to her perception of the poet-muse relationship. Only by looking squarely at the "beast within," Bogan believes, can the poet come to terms with her own hidden powers.

The last three stanzas of "Medusa" describe a scene transformed, as both time and motion are suspended in the wake of the Gorgon's power: "a dead scene forever now," in which "Nothing will ever stir." Medusa has exercised her powers of transformation by recasting her surroundings into silence and stasis, a state which parallels the perpetual suspension of the scene on Keats's Grecian urn. Surprisingly, however, the poet's resolute voice emerges from this silence. Although Bogan calls this a "dead scene," life flourishes amidst the stasis ("The grass will always be growing for hay / Deep on the ground"), and her description conveys a tentative resolution. As the poet stands "like a shadow / Under the great balanced day," she becomes a new Medusa, a potent and demonic goddess capable of controlling herself and her craft, of "killing" life into art. Medusa's silence provides Bogan a powerful, if static, stance from which to speak. The poet's usurpation of the goddess's strength recalls Yeats's enigmatic question at the end of "Leda and the Swan."

Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Unlike Leda, who was forced by Zeus into female subservience, the poet confronts her goddess as a same-sex equal, and that makes all the difference. Bogan assumes both the knowledge and the power of Medusa, her demonic muse, and through this power she redefines stony silence as vital creative energy.

The transference of power from goddess to poet is a central theme also of "The Sleeping Fury," another poem homage to a female muse. Medusa, Cassandra, the Amazon of "The Dream," the temptress of "The Crossed Apple"—virtually all of Bogan's strong, demonic women fuse here into the single evocative image of the fury, "my scourge, my sister," once violent and vengeful but now at rest. This demonic alternate self alludes, of course, to the Maenads of Greek mythology, those orgiastic "madwomen" who avenged Clytemnestra and dismembered Orpheus, and who are generally associated with matriarchal rule. For Bogan, the fury represents an awesome and frightening aspect of her self, one which she has difficulty accepting but which she must confront and control if her art is to flourish. An imagery of transformation dominates the poem, as the fury's destructive vengeance is rejected in favor of a hard-won harmony, a reconciliation of opposing forces: noise and silence, fear and calm, rage and release, demonism and beneficence, war and peace. Ultimately at one with her "fury," the poet affirms her own vital powers born of silence, solitude, and strength gleaned from the goddess-muse.

The poem's first two stanzas describe the "raging beast" now sleeping peacefully.

Confrontation and transformation are key motifs here, as the poet assesses this symbol which has become a reality—a force to be gazed at, reflected upon, and reckoned with. The fury once was overpowering: a Medusa whose hair writhed with deadly serpents, a Cassandra whose shrieking voice would not be silenced. Aware at last, however, of her close link to this female force, still awesome yet paradoxically childlike, Bogan accepts the fury as both scourge and sister. As she reflects in tranquility, she derives new meaning from what was once a symbol of horror; her "fury" becomes a tool for transforming chaos into creative energy. Bogan goes on to describe the furies' fierce nocturnal pursuits, as they travel en masse on a reign of terror, avenging themselves through sacramental offerings and clamoring for sacrificial blood. "Hands full of scourges, wreathed with … flames and adders," Bogan's fury, the "you" of the poem, is particularly vindictive: "You alone turn away, not appeased; unaltered, avenger." Significantly, this shouting, insatiable fury is both separate from and part of the poet, bound to the speaker's side like a shadow: "You alone turned away, but did not move from my side."

Although revenge is the furies' chief occupation, Bogan suggests, these goddesses also manifest powers of revelation. Stanzas six and seven recount the confrontations insisted upon by the furies, as they expose at dawn "The ignoble dream and the mask, sly, with slits at the eyes, / Pretence and half-sorrow, beneath which a coward's hope trembled." Unmasking the coward, the false lover, the liar is a process crucial to both fury and poet, Bogan implies, and one that must begin with inward exploration. The autonomous self can emerge, however, only after meeting the awesome fury,

You who know what we love, but drive us to know it;
You with your whips and shrieks, bearer of truth and of solitude;
You who give, unlike men, to expiation your mercy.

As in "Medusa" and a host of other poems, Bogan employs here the image of face-to-face confrontation to symbolize the transference of power from goddess to mortal woman, muse to poet. As the eyes of the scourged meet those of the scourge, as the hunted advances to face the hunter, the fury's whip and knives are laid to rest, her shouts silenced.

At last the poet's affirmative voice assumes control, a voice emerging from the quiet aftermath in a manner reminiscent of the last line of "Poem in Prose": "it is silence which comes from us." Having exorcised the demon with the power of the daemon, Bogan confronts a solitary and powerful female self:

Beautiful now as a child whose hair, wet with rage and tears
Clings to its face. And now I may look upon you,
Having once met your eyes. You lie in sleep and forget me.
Alone and strong in my peace, I look upon you in yours.

This essay began with questions essential to an understanding of Louise Bogan's poetry and poetics: who or what does Bogan perceive as her muse, and what images does she use to mythologize her relationship to this inspirational source? Furthermore, to what extent is Robert Graves correct in asserting that the woman poet must "be her own muse"? As indicated in the poems in which she employs powerful female personae, especially those with goddesses and mythological women, the muse for Bogan is an aspect of the self which she envisions as a shadow-figure at once demonic and sustaining, silent and vocal, solitary and strong. The balance achieved when scourge and sister attain a reconciled peace provides the poet with a primary source of artistic nourishment. In turn, her art, specifically her "aesthetic of silence," is a crucial tool by which she learns to control her furies, in order to keep them from controlling her. Thus in Bogan's case, at least, Graves's assertion is accurate. By invoking strong female figures who serve as both sources and manifestations of her creativity, Bogan becomes her own muse. "Like scales, cleanly, lightly played," she admits, "myself rises up from myself." In confronting this shadow-self, Bogan moves closer to a reconciliation of public and private, an affirmation of self and art. In the words of Adrienne Rich, Louise Bogan's work represents "a graph of the struggle to commit a female sensibility, in all its aspects, to language. We who inherit that struggle have much to learn from her." [quotation from the book jacket of The Blue Estuaries].

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