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of the last stanza to a practically unbearable point of crisis, and that, my dear, is as you know, the great triumph of the short lyric: that it can be brought up, at the end, into a sound that tears the heart in twain. Of course, you could have it, as you suggested: This is my (something) cry, and then, My rage, my agony. That is what you were working toward, I think. Or you could delete the colon after mouth, and say, I stop the lying mouth, With something or other. I like the colon after that swell line, however. I leave the job of writing the penultimate line to you—nice of me, isn’t it—and I go back to a word meaning apparent that could be clapped in front of agony , to make the last line. And here are all the words the thesaurus gives: conspicuous, manifest, definite, explicit, apparent, notable, notorious, start-staring, literal, plain-spoken, producible, and above board. (I don’t really think above board would do, but some of the others might!) Now go ahead, my dove. It’s your poem, after all. 8
    Young poets rarely win such lavish attention from their elders, or such concrete advice. Suggestions of a more general nature occur in a subsequent, unpublished letter of 3 March 1936; as usual, Bogan is responding to a previous letter of Roethke’s which contained new poems offered up for commentary: “I like your pieces, but I wish you had loosened up in them a little more: been more Theodore in them. Loosen them up, somewhat, if you haven’t already sent them off. Forget the necessity of pure prose and let go.” 9 If one recalls the rich expansiveness of Roethke’s later poetry, which everywhere brims with “Theodore,” it is clear that he was a most attentive student.
    Louise Bogan also warned her apprentice against the enemy of all beginning poets: abstract diction. The following extract comes from a letter dated 14 December 1937: “The latest poem was what Edmund [Wilson] always calls ‘very well written,’ but it was too full of abstractions, and the form is too full of Yeats. And that long form, with short lines, needs some actual objects in it, to come off. You know how full of objects the poem about the man going up to cast flies in the stream, where the stones are dark under froth, is. That’s what your poem needs….” 10 Actual objects , of course, become the focus of Roethke’s poetry in the forties, when the greenhouse world of childhood rushes into his consciousness with all “that anguish of concreteness.” This redirection of vision toward the concrete fact is the beginning of Romantic poetics, for as Emerson said: “To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry.” Abstract knowledge is equivalent to what Plato, in the Republic , calls the level of dianoia or knowledge about things; the poet achieves direct apprehension of the concrete fact, the level of nous , where subject-object separations disappear.
    The young poet has to listen to advice, as I have been suggesting, but there is the obvious danger of mistaken advice; after a certain point, any poet finds himself on his own. In a letter of 3 August 1937, Bogan praises Roethke for eliminating some abstractions. In the unpublished extract from the letter which follows, Bogan also calls Roethke’s attention to the matter of sound and silence in poetry:
    As for your poems, my pet: certainly the nonabstract words tightened and bettered the whole tone. I don’t like Wisdom of the Bold for a title, however. And I wish you’d do some more realistic pieces, outside of your own gizzard—the automobile one was so good. Against Disaster I should shorten. If it were mine (and, of course, it isn’t), I’d omit the last stanza and transpose the third and fourth, and leave it at that. In that way, there’s room enough left for reverberation: the idea isn’t beaten out flat, and you can hear it all better, in the silence made by the abrupt close.