'Art Is Slow and Long'

In 1939, Louise Bogan reviewed for The New Yorker new poetry collections by Archibald MacLeish and Muriel Rukeyser. Her review opens with an oddly contemporary-sounding observation: 

“Last year Archibald MacLeish resorted to scaring people over the radio, with air-raid noises and human screams in order to waken the population to ‘Fascist’ dangers.”

 

Sound familiar? If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been called a “fascist” . . . The word is rivalled only by “racist” when it comes to tediously meaningless slurs. Bogan describes MacLeish’s collection as “the history of the American people sold out by ‘the Aristocracy of politic selfishness,” whatever that means. Talk about unpromising poetic material. Bogan gets to the point: “This poem is Mr. MacLeish’s saddest and most conglomerate attempt at ‘public speech’ to date.” Still, Bogan works to be fair:

 

“Bury his gifts though he may, Mr. MacLeish is a private, a lyric, poet through and through; it is somewhat of a loss that he did not allow himself to remain one. Evil conditions need a satirist to pin them down and flay them clean. Official poets are seldom satirists. A pity.”

 

Bogan describes Rukeyser, a poet who has never given me ten seconds of pleasure, as “interested in the state of society to the almost complete exclusion of any conscious ‘personal expression.’” After rereading Rukeyser’s book, Bogan says, “the suspicion arises that Miss Rukeyser is deficient in a sense of human life” – a not uncommon deficit among “activists.” “The day of chaste and noble proletarian myths should be about over,” Bogan writes “It has been recently proved that there is something hideously oversimplified in crude oppositions and blind idealism.” She concludes her review with a paragraph that recalls W.H. Auden and his near-contemporary condemnation of “a low dishonest decade”:

 

“The decade which outlawed from poetry personal emotion, individual insight, and straight looks into the flawed human heart now closes. It has been a queer time. And, from all current signs, patriotism and ‘public speech’ have still a long course to run. Art is slow and long, but there’s nothing brisker and more vocal than politics.”

 

[Bogan’s review can be found in her Selected Criticism (Noonday Press, 1955).]