THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING
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1.
I suppose I am an isolationist. I do not believe in any war. I think
that in any war both sides lose. In a time of war any man working in the
arts is sunk. His lamps are out. A new and strange ugliness comes into
everyone about him.
It
is for him a time of death.
Louise Bogan:
I.
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 col–
lege, 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 lit–
erary 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 simplifi–
cation, 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 "think–
ing" of Whitman.
2. 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 he led up to the threshold