The Sleeping Fury, by Louise Bogan1

There is one word singularly useful that will one day no doubt be worn out. But that day I hope is not yet. It is the word ‘authentic’. It expresses the feeling that one has at seeing something intimately sympathetic and satisfactory. I had the feeling acutely the other day when slipping along the east side of the Horseshoe Bend, in the long broad valley that runs down to Philadelphia. I saw sunlight, and almost in the same moment a snake fence wriggling its black spikedness over the shoulder of what in England we should call a down, and then the familiar overhanging roof of a Pennsylvania Dutch barn. It would take too long and it would perhaps be impolite to the regions in which these words will be printed to say exactly why I felt so much emotion at seeing those objects. Let it go at the fact that I felt as if, having travelled for a very long time amongst misty objects that conveyed almost nothing to my inner self – nothing, that is to say, in the way of association or remembrance – I had suddenly come upon something that was an integral part of my past. I had once gone heavily over just such fields, stopping to fix a rail or so on just such a fence, and then around the corner of just such a barn onto a wet dirt road where I would find, hitched up, the couple of nearly thoroughbred roans who should spiritedly draw over sand and boulders my buck-board to the post office at the cross-roads. I had come, that is to say, on something that had been the real part of my real life when I was strong, and the blood went more swiftly to my veins, and the keen air more deeply into my lungs. In a world that has become too fluid, they were something authentic.

I had precisely the same sense and wanted to use that same word when I opened Miss Bogan’s book and read the three or four first words. They ran:

Henceforth, from the mind,

For your whole joy …

Nothing more.

I am not any kind of a critic of verse poetry. I don’t understand the claims that verse poets make to be (compared with us prosateurs) beings set apart and mystically revered. Indeed if one could explain that, one could define what has never been defined by either poet or pedestrian: one could define what poetry is.

But one can’t. No one ever has. No one ever will be able to. You might almost think that the real poet, whether he write in prose or verse, taking up his pen, causes with the scratching on the paper such a vibration that that same vibration continues through the stages of being typed, set up in print, printed in magazine, and then in a book – that that same vibration continues right through the series of processes till it communicates itself at last to the reader and makes him say as I said when I read those words of Miss Bogan’s: ‘This is authentic.’ I have read Miss Bogan for a number of years now, and always with a feeling that I can’t exactly define. More than anything, it was, as it were, a sort of polite something more than interest. Perhaps it was really expectation. But the moment I read those words I felt perfectly sure that what would follow would be something stable, restrained, never harrowing, never what the French call chargé – those being attributes of what one most avoids reading. And that was what followed – a series of words, of cadences, thought and disciplined expression that brought to the mental eye and ear, in a kind of television, the image of Miss Bogan writing at the other end of all those processes all the words that go to make up this book.

There are bitter words. But they are not harassingly bitter:

There are parallel series of antithetical thoughts, but the antithesis is never exaggerated:

There are passages that are just beautiful words rendering objects of beauty: