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member, assenting or dissenting, of and within that community; in an
age when there is only a public, his self-development receives no such
extraneous help, so that, unless he replaces it by taking over the task of
directing his life by his own deliberate intention, his growth and hence
his poetry is at the mercy of personal accidents, love-affairs, illnesses,
bereavements, and so forth.
Again it was in the community that he formerly found a source of
value outside himself, and unless he now can replace this vanished source
by another, or at least search for it, his only standard for appreeiating
experience is The Interesting, which in practice means his childhood and
his sex-life, so that he escapes being a journalist who fawns on the public
only to become a journalist who fawns on his own ego; the selection and
treatment of experience is still conditioned by its news value. In the case
of much 'advanced' poetry, the public is therefore, though quite unjusti–
fiably, quite right in repudiating it; not because, as the public thinks, it
is too difficult, but because, once one has learned the idiom, it is too easy;
one can translate it immediately and without loss of meaning into the
language of the Daily Press. Far from being what it claims to be, and is
rejected by the public for being,
The Shrieking heaven lifted over men
it is, what the public demands but finds elsewhere in much better brands,
The dumb earth wherein they set their graves
A volume of good poetry, like this collection of Miss Louise Bogan's,
represents today therefore a double victory, over the Collective Self and
over the Private Self. As her epigraph she uses a quotation from Rilke–
Wie ist das klein womit wir ringen,
was mit uns ringt, wie ist das gross
And the poems that follow are the fruit of such a belief, held and prac–
tised over years, that Self-development is a process of self-surrender, for it
is the Self that demands the exclusive attention of all experiences, but
offers none in return.
The playthings of the young
Get broken in the play,
Get broken, as they should.
In the early sections Miss Bogan employs her gift in the way in
which, as a rule, it should at first be employed, to understand her weak–
ness to which it is dialectically related, for wherever there is a gift, of
whatever kind, there is also a guilty secret, a thorn in the flesh and the
first successful poems of young poets are usually a catharsis of resentment.
Cry song, cry
And hear your crying lost
Poems at this stage are usually short, made up of magical lyric
phrases which seems to rise involuntarily to the consciousness, and their
composition is attended by great excitement, a feeling of being inspired.
Some excellent poets, like Houseman and Emily Dickinson, never get
beyond this stage, because the more successful the catharsis, the more
dread there must be of any change either in one's life or one's art, for a
