On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan's The Blue Estuaries

Though not always explicit, the value of something is stored within the contents of an object to be determined by an individual, rather than the subjective appreciation of that certain something. Rather than relying on endorsements from idols in a certain field, value is something more essential to an existence, which never varies due to the inability of mere thought to alter the bounds of universal truth. Discussed in the poem “On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan’s The Blue Estuaries”, a poem about a shopper appreciating an unknown book more than the famous names of literature to the point of potentially shoplifting the book, written by Julia Alvarez, the value of a writing shifts from the community to the individual though the use of diction sought to illustrate

This piece is replete with the emotions of the speaker as he or she shifts from the curiosity of discovering a previously unknown book to positively responsive by the unearthed writing to the point in which influences the speaker to enforce the writings of the books with the “tip of my pen” (ln. 30). Once described as a “foreign alphabet” (ln. 36), has now surpassed the iconic writers, specifically Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and Yeats, despite being clandestine to academia. This unconventional actions strives towards the objective of acting as a contrary position to the commonly subscribed belief to a system perpetrated by highbrow intellectuals, adding to the argument that the mere feature of the author’s name adds value to the writing, illustrated by the named feature to be described as “blurred underwater” (ln. 12) and “sinking to the bottom” (ln. 13). Making this clear, the author seeks to establish that the system of reputation, by the elites, have lacked in comparison to the individual merits of a writing to be perceived and exhumed by the