Foremother Poet: Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

Louise Bogan

Dear friends and readers,

This is the first foremother poet blog I’ve written since putting up my new From the Women’s Canon: Foremother Poets on my website. I chose her as first because when reading through anthologies I’ve been caught by one of her poems again and again. This is my favorite, the kind of poem one reads and thereafter doesn’t forget having read, even if details face:

“Evening in the Sanitarium”

The free evening fades, outside the windows fastened with
       decorative iron grilles.
The lamps are lighted; the shades are drawn; the nurses are watching
       a little.
It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bones of needles;       &nbspof the games of anagrams and bridge;
The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask.

The period of the wildest weeping, the fiercest delusion, is over.
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost
       well.

Some of them will stay almost well always; the blunt-faced woman
       whose thinking dissolved
Under academic discipline; the manic-depressive girl
Now levelling off one paranoiac afflicted with jealousy.
Another with persecution. Some alleviation has been possible.

O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after
       childbirth!
O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted!
To the surburban railway station you will return, return,
To meet forever Jim home on the on the 5:35.
You will be again as normal and selfish and heartless as anybody
       else.

There is life left: the piano says it with its octave smile.
The soft carpets pad the thump and splinter of the suicide to be.
Everything will be splendid: the grandmother will not drink
       habitually.
The fruit salad will bloom on the plate like a bouquet
And the garden produce the blue-ribbon aquilegia.
The cat will be glad; the fathers feel justified; the mothers
       relieved.
The sons and husbands will no longer need to pay the bills.
Childhood will be put away, the obscene nightmare abated.

At the ends of corridors the baths are running.
Mrs C. again feels the shadow of the obsessive idea.
Miss R. looks at the mantel-piece, which must mean something
(1941)

(This puts me in mind of Susan Hill’s A Change for the Better where an older woman leaves, escapes is the more accurate word, her daughter’s house and moves to a home for the retired, and finds a better life. Or Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palefrey at the Claremont where a much much older woman develops a loving friendship with a young man.)

The essayist at the Poetry Foundation distinguishes Louise Bogan as “the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century,” and heaps honorific words and phrases on her (“restrained, subtle, intellectual style,” about “private experience, but is not private,” “precise” and complex” (!), and of course not susceptible to alignment with feminists (by whom she has been “unfairly castigated”, “meticulously distilled”)a and writes about “betrayal, especially sexual betrayal.” She is terse, writes rhymed, accentual poetry, uses stanzas, and her poems tend to be short. See Glora Bowles, Louise Bogan’s Aesthetic of Limitation [Indiana University Press, 1987]).. I like all this and how her poetry has inward stance, is often profoundly melancholy. I love its stillness (that’s why the often-reprinted “Medusa”), its subjects which seem to be very much that of a woman (though they are often unspecific in origin). In many the implied speaker is an older women, more vulnerable, uglier (or so the world and men judge her), but at the same time or thus freer, having given over wanting what one cannot have

“Henceforth, From the Mind”

Henceforth, from the mind,
For your whole joy, must spring
Such joy as you may find
In any earthly thing,
And every time and place
Will take your thought for grace.

Henceforth, from the tongue,
From shallow speech alone,
Comes joy you thought, when young,
Would wring you to the bone,
Would pierce you to the heart
And spoil its stop and start.

Henceforward, from the shell,
Wherein you heard, and wondered
At oceans like a bell
So far from ocean sundered —
A smothered sound that sleeps
Long lost within lost deeps,

Will chime you change and hours,
The shadow of increase,
Will sound you flowers
Born under troubled peace-
Henceforth, henceforth
Will echo sea and earth.

I like the love poems which use vast and classical imagery, which are drenched with sudden hope and insight out of grief and loss:

“Song for the Last Act”

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I look.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music’s cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
o not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

“Zone”

We have struck the regions wherein we are keel or reef.
The wind breaks over us,
And against high sharp angles almost splits into words,
And these are of fear or grief.

Like a ship, we have struck expected latitudes
Of the universe, in March.
Through one short segment’s arch
Of the zodiac’s round
We pass,
Thinking: Now we hear
What we heard last year,
And bear the wind’s rude touch
And its ugly sound
Equally with so much
We have learned how to bear.

“The Crows”

The woman who has grown old
And knows desire must die,
Yet turns to love again,
Hears the crows’ cry.

She is a stem long hardened,
A weed that no scythe mows.
The heart’s laughter will be to her
The crying of the crows,

Who slide in the air with the same voice
Over what yields not, and what yields,
Alike in spring, and when there is only bitter
Winter-burning in the fields.

She is also likened to the metaphysical poets, to Walter Pater (and his love of aestheticism), but it seems to me she eschews being outstanding, nothing forced, all plain common words. She’ll call a poem, “Second Song,” and begin “I said out of sleeping,” and yet is unlike Emily Dickinson, doesn’t shock or startle you frontally (“Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed”), and she can be irritated, as in another often-reprinted “Women:” “Women have no wildernesses in them/They are provident instead.” Not everyone can take a chance, be wild, wander about daringly as she did.

I prefer the poems where she drops all classical masks and uses the imagery of such poetry to visualize her state. Her sister here is her other uncontrollable self:

“The Sleeping Fury”

Your hair fallen on your cheek, no longer in the sem-
      blance of serpents,
Lifted in the gale; your mouth, that shrieked so, silent.
You, my scourge, my sister, lie asleep, like a child,
Who, after rage, for an hour quiet, sleeps out its tears.

      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.

No sentimental returns to childhood for her when she grew older: from “Kept:” “The trumpery dolls, the toys/Now to be put away:/We are not girls and boys.

And I get a certain wry exhilaration from her address to her glass of wine, enemy and long-time friend:

… Take from the mind its loss …
Return to the vein
All that is worth
Grief. Give that beat again.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1825), Wineglasses (1875)

****************************

Louise Bogan (late in life)

Despite growing up the daughter of a white collar mill-worker (her father) whose mother is described as “unstable” (very bad, and yet worse, adulterous), one of three children where the middle child died, moving about she had an excellent education: a New Hampshire convent (1906-1908) and at Boston’s excellent Girls’ Latin School (1910-1915), where she received a classical education in Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, history, science, and the arts. How I know not. She even went to Boston University, and then by earning a scholarship to Radcliffe. Another bad mistake was escape through an early marriage to a German soldier, which landed her in Panama, with a daughter; another flight to her parents ended in reconciliation with the husband and army base life. By 1919 though she left her daughter with her parents, and went to NY, a year later upon her husband’s death gaining a widow’s pension. Somehow she then went from a job at Brentano’s bookstore (there weren’t so many of these good bookstores then) to being a member of the NY literary community, people who counted (good poets and writers too), friend of Edmund Wilson.

1925 another husband (Raymond Holden, from a wealthy family, a sometime poet and novelist who had been a friend of Robert Frost), she retrieves her daughter and is living the life of a woman of letters. A Guggenheim in 1932 (and trip to Europe, Italy, France, and Austria, struggling to write and often depressed, the marriage falling apart completely), she returned to NY to put herself into a hospital (again they were different then) with a severe nervous breakdown. Out (7 months), divorcing, making it with some good friends, she became a staff writer and wrote stories for the New Yorker. Money troubles came (she was once evicted) but the 1930s and 40s were good years for her; they included a love affair with a younger poet, Theodore Roethke. Out of Italy and this relationship came the magnificent:

Roman Fountain

Up from the bronze I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the iamge whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain’s bowl
Alive the air of summer

Sargent, A Roman Fountain in a Medici Villa

Another good relationship much later was with a much-less admired man, an electrician from the Bronx who helped her during a depression (they met on a boat to Southampton); she hid this lover from her friends so the sources I’ve read don’t cite his name. Her last apartment was on West 169th and from there she lived her later hard-working sometimes depressed years as critic, essayist and poet. She was alcoholic in these later years. She died in her apartment of a coronary occlusion February 4, 1970.

I hope to read her autobiography this coming year (or soon at any rate): Journey Around My Room, edited by Ruth Limmer. Her original works include: Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (Chicago: Regnery, 1951); Collected Poems, 1923-1953 (New York: Noonday Press, 1954); Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry (New York: Noonday Press, 1955); The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968); A Poet’s Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation, edited by Robert Phelps and Ruth Limmer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).

It fascinates me that she translated Goethe’s dark bitter Elective Affinities: I realize I’ve read his Sorrows of Werther in her translation (both with Elizabeth Mayer). She wrote on Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf. Ruth Limmer (who seems to have been her close friend) edited her letters: What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters, 1920-1970. Elizabeth Frank’s is the biography cited: Louise Bogan: A Portrait (New York: Knopf, 1985). Jaqueline Ridgeway did the sensible Twayen. Jane Couchman produced a book of primary materials by Bogan for research; Martha Collins an anthology of critical essays. Poets Bogan’s studied with: Elizabeth C. Dodd, The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück; Mary DeShazer, “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 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), pp. 92-104.

Margaret Foreman (b. 1951), Mrs Mabel Whitehead (cover illustration for Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palefrey at the Claremont)

Ellen