Louise Bogan

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Impassioned Austerity

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SOURCE: "Impassioned Austerity," in Poetry, Vol. XXIII, No. 6, March, 1924, pp. 335–38.

[In the following review, Wolf avers that the language in Body of This Death is often inadequate for the meaning Bogan tries to convey.]

Louise Bogan's Body of This Death has more than anything else the quality of direct, simple, almost cruel statement. In a kind of contained twilight frenzy, without excuse or hesitation, the poet lays her hand deliberately upon the central key of a mood, and follows her own instruction:

Then, for every passion's sake,
Beat upon it till it break.

The material of the book is, in symbol or simple fact, the love experience of a modern woman, in Miss Bogan's case tinged with a tragedy that is not less impressive for being nameless. As in the lyric called "Song," below, it is throughout single, insistent, unvarnished:

Love me because I am lost;
Love me that I am undone.
That is brave—no man has wished it,
Not one.

Be strong to look on my heart
As others look on my face.
Love me—I tell you that it is a ravaged
Terrible place.

Except for the early "Macaw" with its beautiful eleventh line, and its less authentic other thirteen, there is hardly any waste motion in the book, and hardly any ornamentation. Miss Bogan's fault lies in the other direction. Her words too often lockstep upon themselves, like prisoners of some terrible intensity. She needs, if anything, to deliver herself more loosely and luxuriously to her art. Even "Chanson Un Peu Naïve," perhaps the most beautiful poem in the book, has an occasional gasp of constriction that mars its hauntingly clear music; and "The Frightened Man" runs down-hill into an inconclusive ending:

In fear of the rich mouth
I kissed the thin—
Even that was a trap
To snare me in.

Even she, so long
The frail, the scentless,
Is become strong
And proves relentless.

Oh, forget her praise,
And how I sought her
Through a hazardous maze
By shafted water.

In its extraordinary economy, the texture of Miss Bogan's verse is perhaps nearer to Mrs. Wylie than to any of her other contemporaries. But Miss Bogan is never obscure, like Mrs. Wylie, from fantasy or reticence. Where Miss Bogan is difficult—and she often is—it is because she has too much to say; it is because each word is pregnant with such extreme intensity that she has not woven language that will bear the burden.

Of those of her fellow-poets to whom she has been so far chiefly compared, she is by no means so breathtaking as Edna Millay, but perhaps even more austere and ruthless; she lacks the warm richness of Genevieve Taggard, but makes up with an individual and lean athletic quality; and if she can not pack words as deftly as Mrs. Wylie, her speech is much more vital. Or to change the metaphor, in the orchestra of the younger women poets, as some one else has said, Louise Bogan plays the 'cello, while Edna Millay is probably first violin, Genevieve Taggard improvises on the organ, and Elinor Wylie is active at the xylophone and triangles. Miss Bogan is the newest and least flawless. She is molding a technique for herself where each word has the importance of a deliberate and separately thrown grenade; but she is not yet quite at full ease with her method—she is not able to play with it in the spacious carelessness that denotes real freedom.

I quote below "The Romantic," one of the most poignant poems in the book, and one of those which seem to me without a single flaw:

Admit the ruse to fix and name her chaste
With those who sleep the spring through, one and one
Cool nights, when laurel builds up without haste
Its precise flower, like a pentagon.

In her obedient breast, all that ran free
You thought to bind, like echoes in a shell.
At the year's end, you promised, it would be
The unstrung leaves, and not her heart, that fell.

So the year broke and vanished on the screen
You cast about her; summer went to haws.
This, by your leave, is what she should have been—
Another man will tell you what she was.

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