Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 277Wylie, Teasdale, Bogan, Adams, and, to a lesser extent, Millay were
skilled metricists who embraced a poetics of closure and often wrote lyrics,
ballads, odes, and sonnets. Their work is carefully wrought and has the
formalist quality, as Moore said of Bogan, of “compactness compacted.”^75
Each owes a large debt to the Metaphysical poets who were in ascendance in
the early twenties, and each in her own way adapts a poetry of paradox and
wit to a Romantic sensibility. Ultimately, they are poets of the expressive self,
of a radical subjectivity committed to emotion. In Bogan’s words, emotion is
“the kernel which builds outward form from inward intensity.”^76 Their neo-
Romanticism was also a revolt against Victorian sentimentality, against false
emotions and posturing, and against decorative ornamentation. There is a
tension and conflict in their work between exuberant desire and romantic
aspiration and the requirements of limited form, the demands of hardness,
clarity, precision. Millay was the most florid and expansive of the poets,
Bogan the most clipped and austere, but each expressed a deep longing for
escape in strictly determined forms. Love is the circumscribed subject in
most of their poetry—partially because the love poem was a form of
discourse that included women in a way that the poetry of history did not
include them. In these lyrics women are not idealized objects or muses, but
motivating subjects: self-assertive, joyous, sometimes arrogant, singing of
extreme emotional deprivation or thwarted passion, insisting, too, on
physical passion and sensuality, the profound conflict between mind and
body.
The traditional female lyricists of the twenties inherited a heritage of
the divided self. Their poems enact a series of conflicts and unresolved
contraries: passion against restraint, easy flow against containment, the
outward suppression of the female personality in a male-dominated society
against the inner desire for self-assertion and authorship. Often the need for
self-expression and the desire for freedom from restrictive social roles is
coded in terms of a timeless quest for spiritual loveliness and beauty. Inspired
by Shelley and Christina Rosetti as well as by Donne and Jonson, their
lyrics—especially the lyrics of Wylie and Teasdale—suggest a succession of
strategies for fending off a hostile outside world and maintaining the fragile
integrity of the individual self. Their Platonism and ecstatic love of beauty,
their concern with ultimate themes, expresses a veiled personal and social
need for autonomy. So, too, their poetry is visionary in its determined quest
for an absolute truth to replace a lost god.
In their work in the twenties, Elinor Wylie, Sara Teasdale, and Louise
Bogan, as well as Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, showed themselves to be
redemptive poets writing at perhaps an unredeemable time in American