'A Coating of Sensuous Feeling'

“The element of wit has to be present; there is nothing duller or more unmalleable than serious conviction, seriously expressed.”

 Screeds, sermons and manifestos are not poetry or even good prose except, rarely, in gifted hands. Neither are crackpot theories (on usury, for example). How I dread soap-box earnestness and the absence of humor. Louise Bogan is writing to the poet May Sarton on this date, March 17, in 1955, the year of Howl. Bogan was a serious, occasionally hospitalized depressive but her words and thoughts have a commonsensical sanity about them. Earlier in her letter she writes:

 

“I want to write you rather fully about the problem of argument in poetry, but cannot do it properly today. Of course, everything is material for poems—even the ‘passive suffering’ (sometimes), that Yeats deplored; but argument should be dramatized, as Yeats learned to dramatize, rather than projected straight—the dramatic monologue helps.”

 

Bogan’s right. We’ll accept almost any sentiment as entertainable, so long as it is expressed by a character, a voice in the poem rather than the poet orating. The same goes for fiction. Critics politely refer to novels with characters who serve as the author’s mouthpiece as “essayistic.” Other words are “lazy,” “didactic” and "tiresome." Bogan continues:

 

“It is impossible really to argue, in lyric poetry, because too many abstractions tend to creep in—and abstract ideas must get a coating of sensuous feeling before they become true poetic material; unless one is a born satirist.”

 

She notes that Auden often argues but “with much satire involved.” Here’s the conclusion of Bogan’s letter to Sarton:

 

“Certainly ‘unadulterated life’ must be transposed, although it need not be ‘depersonalized.’ Otherwise you get ‘self-expression’ only; and that is only half of art. The other half is technical, as well as emotional, and the most poignant poems are those in which the technique takes up the burden of the feeling instantly; and that presupposes a practised [sic] technique.”

 

Appropriately for a March 17 letter, Bogan cites Yeats and signs off with “Love on the day of all the Patricks!”

 

[You can find Bogan’s letter in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005).]