BOOKS
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are religious or nothing, and a religion cannot be got out of books or by
a sudden vision, but can only be realised by living it. And to see this is
to see that one's poetic development must be restrained from rushing
ahead of oneself while at the same time one's self-development must not
be allowed to fall behind.
Reading through Miss Bogan's book, one realizes what is the price
and the reward for such a discipline.
The hasty reader hardly notices any development; the subject matter
and form show no spectacular change: he thinks-"Miss Bogan. 0 yes, a
nice writer of lyrics, but all these women poets, you know, slight. Only
one string to their bow."
It
is only by reading and rereading that one
comes to appreciate the steady growth of wisdom and technical mastery,
the persistent elimination of the consolations of stoicism and every other
kind of poetic theatre, the achievement of an objectivity about personal
experience which is sought by many but found only by the few who dare
face the Furies.
You who know what we love, but drive us to know·it;
You with your whips and shrieks, bearer of truth
and
of solitude;
You wlw give, unlike men, to expiation your mercy.
Dropping the scourge when at last the scourged advances to meet it,
You, when the hunted turns, no longer remain the hunter
Eut stand silent and wait,
at
last returning his gaze.
Beautiful now as a child whose hair, wet with rage and tears
Clings to its face. And now I may look upon you,
Having once met your eyes. You li.e in sleep and forget me.
Alone and strong in my peace, I look upon you in yours.
In the last two sections, in poems like
Animal, Vegetable and Mineral
and
Evening in the Sanitarium
Miss Bogan turns to impersonal subjects, and
here again the hasty will say: "too slight. I prefer her earlier work,"
because he cannot understand the integrity of an artist who will not rush
her sensibility, knowing that no difficulty can be cheated without incurring
punishment.
But the difficulty of being an artist in an age when one has to live
everything for oneself, has its compensations. It is, for the strong, a joy
to know that now there are no longer any places of refuge in which one
can lie down in comfort, that one must go on or go under, live dangerously
or not at all.
It is therefor impossible today to pred.ict the future of any poet
because the future is never the consequence of a single decision but is
continually created by a process of choice in which temptation and oppor·
tunity are perpetually presented, ever fresh and ever unforseen. All one
can say is that Miss Bogan is a poet in whom, because she is so clearly
aware of this, one has complete faith as to her instinct for direction and
her endurance, and that, anyway, what she has already written is of per·
manent value. Future generations will, of course, be as foolish as ours,
