Love Quote by Louise Bogan

Bogan’s line reads like a rebuke to two popular myths about art: that great work comes either from spotless purity or from glamorous torment. She insists on the uncomfortable braid of both. “Innocence of heart” isn’t childish naivete; it’s the stubborn capacity to meet experience without becoming wholly defended by irony, careerism, or fashionable despair. It’s the part of the artist that still believes a poem can matter, that a line can be true even after you’ve learned how often language lies.

Then she snaps the other half into place: “violence of feeling.” Not melodrama, not a public breakdown staged for attention, but force - the internal pressure that makes form necessary. Violence here is the energy that threatens to spill, the emotional weather severe enough that craft becomes more than ornament. Bogan, a poet famous for compression and control, is quietly arguing that restraint is not the opposite of intensity; it is what intensity demands if it’s going to become art instead of noise.

The subtext is almost moral: “superior achievement” requires vulnerability without sentimentality, ferocity without self-indulgence. Coming from a 20th-century modernist sensibility - suspicious of gush, allergic to easy consolations - this is also a defense of depth against mere cleverness. Art, she implies, dies when innocence hardens into cynicism or when feeling is domesticated into tasteful emotion. The arts can’t exist without the risk of being moved and the courage to shape that movement into something exact.