Books
THE REWARDS OF PATIENCE
Poems and New Poems. By Louise Bogan. Scribners. $2.50
"Genius has only an immanent teleology, it develops itself, and while
developing itself this self-development projects itself as its work. Genius
is therefor in no sense inactive, and works within itself perhaps harder
than ten business men, but none of its achievements have any exterior
telos. This is at once the humanity and the pride of genius; the humanity
ties in the fact that it does not define itself teleologically in relation to
other men, as though there were any one who needed it; its pride lies in
the fact that it immanently relates itself to itself. It is modest of the
nightingale not to require anyone to listen to it; but it is also proud of
the nightingale not to care whether anyone listens to it or not.... The
honored public, the domineering masses, wish genius to express that it
exists for their sake; they only see one side of the dialectic of genius, take
offence at its pride, and do not see that the same thing is also modesty
and humility."
So wrote Kierkegaard in 1847; he did not foresee that by 1942 the
masses would have acquired such buying power that genius itself would,
in many cases, be thinking of its self-development as a process of learn–
ing how to sell itself competitively to the public, that the poet whose true
song, unlike that of the nightingale, continually changes because he him·
self changes, would be tempted to dissociate his· song from his nature
altogether, until the changes in the latter come to be conditioned, not by
changes in himself, but by the shifting of public taste-that he would
become, in other words, a journalist.
A public is a disintegrated community. A community is a society of
rational beings united by a common tie in virtue of the things that they
all love; a public is a crowd of lost beings united only negatively in virtue
of the things that they severally fear, among which one of the greatest is
the fear of being responsible as a rational being for one's individual self–
development. Hence, wherever there is a public, there arises the paradox
of a tremendous demand for art in the abstract, but an almost complete
repudiation of art in the concrete. A demand because works of art can
indeed help people along the road of self-development, and the public
feels more helpless than ever; a repudiation because art can only help
those who help themselves. It can suggest directions in which people may
look if they will; it cannot give them eyes or wills, but it is just these
eyes and wills that the public demand, and hope to buy with money and
applause.
Subjectively, the situation of the poet is no less difficult. In ages when
there was such a thing as a community, the self-development of which his
works are the manifestation, arose, in part at least, out of his life as a
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