Life & Wisdom Quote by Louise Bogan

A poet’s vow to stop playing hall monitor in a scene that rewards policing. Bogan’s triple “No more” lands like a self-issued ceasefire: she’s done with pronouncements, done with the petty prestige economy, done with the exhausting performance of being “with it.” The diction is deliberately unglamorous. “Lousy verse” punctures the romance of the calling; it’s not “bad art” but bad writing, the kind you’re expected to tolerate, review, or diplomatically ignore. “Pronouncements” skewers the critical voice she herself sometimes inhabited, the authoritative tone that can harden into reflex.

Then comes the real tell: “hidden competition.” This is not open rivalry (which at least has the honesty of ambition), but the covert ranking system of literary culture - the side glances, the strategic praise, the friendships that double as auditions. Bogan exposes the subtext that makes even aesthetic judgment feel like social maneuvering. The line isn’t just about poems; it’s about status.

The final clause sharpens into social satire: “struggling not to be a square.” That’s mid-century slang, but the feeling is evergreen - the panic of appearing old, stiff, irrelevant. For a woman poet navigating a mostly male establishment and rapidly shifting modernist fashions, the pressure to seem current could become its own kind of servitude. Bogan’s intent reads as reclamation: a refusal to be drafted into taste-making as performance. The wit is austere, but the liberation is loud.