[MUSIC] [SOUND] Are these poems sentimental? Despite the accusations later made against them, early 20th century American women poets didn't think so. Following Teasdale, they insisted repeatedly that their poetry differed radically in feeling from the poems of the previous century. This is not to say that they denied their poetry's emotional qualities. However, they believed that its emotions had been reformed. Louise Bogan made what is perhaps the strongest case for the formal and emotional newness of modernist women's poetry. Like her modernist contemporaries, Bogan considered sentimentality to be a threat to serious poetry. She routinely used terms like mawkish and sentimental to characterize her own failed poetry and she jokingly disparaged the form of emotional excess that she termed, Ella Wheeler Wilcoxism, a reference to the popular 19th century poetess. Bogan writes, Never shall I give the feminine sonneteers any competition. However, despite these criticisms, Bogan did not reject 19th century sentimentality entirely. In her essay, The Heart and the Lyre, which focuses explicitly on her 19th century female predecessors, Bogan suggests that a sentimental tradition might help to remedy the emotional void present in modern American poetry. Bogan writes, The great importance of keeping the emotional channels of literature open has frequently been overlooked. The need of the refreshment and restitution of feeling, in all it's warmth and depth, has never been more important than it is today, when cruelty and fright often seem about to overwhelm man and his world. For women to abandon their contact with, and their expression of deep and powerful emotional streams, because of contemporary pressures or mistaken self-consciousness, would result in an impoverishment not only of their own inner resources but of mankind's at large. Certainly it is not a regression to romanticism to remember that women are capable of perfect and poignant song. By keeping the emotional channels open, Bogan argues for the need to conserve the warmth and depth of 19th century sentimental poetry while simultaneously challenging its aesthetic limits. In the 1930s, she passed these lessons on to Theodore Roethke, her one time lover and life long friend. Early in his poetic career, Bogan warned Roethke not to invest to heavily in form at the expense of emotional expression. Bogan writes, The difficulty with you now, as I see it, is that you are afraid to suffer, or to feel in any way, and that is what you'll have to get over, lamb pie, before you can toss of the masterpieces. A poem cannot be written by technique alone, Bogan continues. It is carved out of agony, just as a statue is carved out of marble. Bogan's poem The Alchemist, which first appeared in her 1923 collection Body of This Death, illustrates the sophistication of her thinking regarding emotion and poetic form. Although Bogan's theories are not entirely in line with her high modernist contemporaries, they do not appear to be sentimental either. I burned my life, that I might find a passion wholly of the mind, Thought divorced from eye and bone, Ecstasy come to breath alone. I broke my life, to seek relief From the flawed light of love and grief. With mounting beat the utter fire Charred existence and desire. It died low, ceased it's sudden thresh. I had found unmysterious flesh- Not the mind's avid substance- still Passionate beyond the will. The poem participates in a long line of poems dedicated to the magical science of alchemy. Shelly, Byron, Matthew, Arnold. And in a modernist context Genevieve Taggard, and William Butler Yeats, all wrote about the transformative process of turning base metals into gold. Bogan's poem is particularly resonant with Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium. In this poem, Yeats' speaker is quote, sick with desire, and he craves the purifying influence of God's holy fire. Consume my heart away, Yeats' speaker begs, and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. For Yeats, Byzantium serves as a metaphor for the spirits transcendence of the body. The body is a dying animal which impedes the speakers communion with eternity. Yeats' spiritual yearning to transcend a decaying body and a heart that refuses to die is similar to TS Eliot's in his influential essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent. Here, as in Sailing to Byzantium, the bodily form is tempered or purified through an alchemical process. For Yeats it is the spirit that transcends, and for Eliot, the mind that transmutes a baser bodily substance. In Eliot's quasi-scientific language, the poet's mind functions as a catalyst, digesting and transmuting the raw stuff of emotion into a new, more perfect compound. The more perfect the artist, Eliot writes, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. This alchemic metaphor is one of the most influential in modernist poetry. It is the root of Eliot's theory of impersonality. Eliot is not arguing for an unemotional form of poetry, but notice that he is privileging the mind over the body. Impersonality is a method for intellectualizing the emotions or passions for managing them consciously through poetic form. At the outset of The Alchemist Bogan's poetic speaker seems to have taken Eliot at his word. I burned my life, she begins probably documenting the lengths to which he was willing to go in pursuit of an impersonal poetics. A passion holy of the mind. Yet rather than a new compound, quote, the mind's avid substance. Bogan's alchemy has produced only unmysterious flesh. By attempting to separate her intellect from her body, to transmute the base material of emotion into a finer substance. The speaker has not only destroyed her life, but ironically discovered that emotion is fundamentally more pure than intellect. This is what remains in the poems final line quote, still Passionate beyond the will. There's no transcendence to be found in Bogan's poem only the keen insight that emotions and the body cannot be managed fully by the conscious mind. Notice for instance, the rhythmic breaks that disrupt the poems meter in the second stanza. From the heavily stressed tetrameter of lines seven and eight, a mounting beat, created by the use I ams and. The poem moves into the less regular rhythms of unmysterious and passionate, both of which contains dactyls that fundamentally alter the meter of those lines. In this rhythmic shift, Bogan models that unruliness of emotion. A trace of effective or bodily agency that has exceeded the subjects best attempts of formal discipline. In contrast to both Elliot and Yeats, Bogan's alchemy a western masculine ideal of the mind in favor of an embodied formalism. [MUSIC]
