POET

Louise Bogan (1897 - 1970)

BIOGRAPHY

Louise Bogan has been called by some critics the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century. Her subtle, restrained, intellectual style was greatly influenced by the English metaphysical poets. Many have placed her in the same category with George Herbert, John Donne, and Henry Vaughan. Bogan belonged to a group of brilliant minor poets described by some as the "reactionary generation." Aware of the success of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Bogan and others chose to follow the traditional English form of expression of the seventeenth century, which included the use of meter. Although she utilized traditional techniques, her poetry is modern, her language immediate and contemporary. Bogan's poetry contains a personal quality derived from personal experience, but it is not private. Her poems, most critics agree, are economical in words, masterpieces of crossed rhythms in which the meter opposes word groupings. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier named Bogan "one of the finest lyric poets America has produced," and added that "the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending."

Bogan was born in Maine, the daughter of a mill worker. Her parents' marriage was not a happy one, due largely to her mother's mental and emotional instability. As the Bogans moved from one New England mill town to the next, May Bogan indulged in numerous extramarital affairs, which she flaunted. She also mystified her family with frequent and lengthy disappearances. Millier proposed that "the difficulties and instabilities of her childhood produced in Bogan a preoccupation with betrayal and a distrust of others, a highly romantic nature, and a preference for the arrangements of art over grim, workaday reality."

Bogan's father saw to it that she was well-educated, sending her to some of New England's best schools, including the Girls' Latin School in Boston. After a year at Boston University, she won a scholarship to Radcliffe, but turned it down to move to New York City with her husband. The couple eventually moved to Panama, where she wrote some of poems that appeared in her early collections. Bogan eventually left her husband in order to pursue a career as a woman of letters. Living in New York, she became friends with such influential literary figures as Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, Conrad Aiken, and Edmund Wilson.

Body of This Death was her first volume of poetry, and it "contains several of Bogan's most memorable poems and in general reveals its author's preoccupations and tastes," advised Millier. "Betrayal, particularly sexual betrayal, is a constant theme." The critic found these poems, like Bogan's poetry in general, to be "made of meticulously distilled experience, distanced from the source by objective language." Several in the collection "address specifically female concerns and point to Bogan's ambivalent relationship with the tradition of female lyric poets." Millier added: "Her poems are by no means dogmatically feminist; Bogan held a deep distrust for all ideological commitment. In fact, she has been castigated somewhat unfairly by contemporary feminists."

Sleeping Fury was another early volume of poetry. In a review of that book, the Springfield Republican noted that "Miss Bogan's poetry appeals to the comparative few who appreciate delicacy and artistry in verse." A Books review said Bogan "has achieved a mastery of form rare in the realm of modern poetry. There is creative architecture in even the slightest of her lyrics. Miss Bogan works not as a landscape painter (while her visual imagery is exact, it does not depend on color alone), nor yet as a musician—although in many of her poems, the auditory imagery is superior to the visual: the ear listens, even as the eye sees. Her art is that of a sculpture." A Nation critic wrote, "Distinguished is the word one always thinks of in connection with Louise Bogan's poetry. Whatever form she tries, her art is sure, economical, and self-definitive. There is never in her poems a wasted adjective or phrase but always perfect clarity and a consistent mood precisely set down. She can write the completely artless lyric or the very subtle poem worked out through complex imagery."

Reviewing Poems and New Poems in Saturday Review, William Rose Benet noted, "Her poetry is, and always has been, intensely personal. She has inherited the Celtic magic of language, but has blended it somehow with the tartness of New England." Marianne Moore further observed in Nation, "Women are not noted for terseness, but Louise Bogan's art is compactness compacted. Emotion with her, as she has said of certain fiction is 'itself form, the kernel which builds outward form from inward intensity.' She uses a kind of forged rhetoric that nevertheless seems inevitable."

Collected Poems, 1923-1953 was reviewed in the New York Times by Richard Eberhart. "Louise Bogan's poems adhere to the center of English with a dark lyrical force," wrote Eberhart. "What she has to say is important. How she says it is pleasing. She is a compulsive poet first, a stylist second. When compulsion and style meet, we have a strong, inimitable Bogan poem." Saturday Review commented, "Louise Bogan is mistress of precise images and commands an extensive range of poetic accents and prosodic effects; she is also a musician, whose notes are as crystalline as those of Chopin's Preludes. More than this, one cannot read far in her pages without realizing that at the core of her poetry is mind-stuff which it is fashionable to call metaphysical." These poems are also important because they deal intelligently with the themes of sexual love and bodily decay.

The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968 was the final collection of poems published before Bogan's death. The New York Times reviewed the book: "Now that we can see the sweep of forty-five years work in this collection of over a hundred poems, we can judge what a feat of character it has been. . . . [Her diction] stems from the severest lyrical tradition in English. . . . [Her language is] as supple as it is accurate, dealing with things in their own tones."

With the assistance of William Jay Smith, Bogan compiled an anthology of poems for children. The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People, with poems ranging from Shakespeare to Dylan Thomas, was described by James Dickey as possibly "the best general anthology of poems for young people ever compiled. By the poems they present, by their arrangement and timing, the editors subtly hold out the possibility that a child—though a child—is capable of rising to good poems, and so of becoming, through an encounter which also requires much of him, something more than he was. . . . [This book] could have been selected only by poets as distinguished as these two, and by human beings who realize that to make the wrong concessions to children is injurious to them."

Bogan also wrote a great deal of criticism. Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 was a brief account of American poetry during the first half of this century. The Chicago Tribune described the book as "a delight. Like all Miss Bogan's criticism, this book is full of acute, spirited, and authoritative judgments of writers and works, expressed with grace and wit." The New York Times added, "Louise Bogan not only manages to compress a formidable amount of factual information into her small compass but also contrives to do a great deal of satisfactory talking about her facts." The United States Quarterly Book Review commented, "Miss Bogan's clarity of style, her ability to compress a great deal of information into a few lucid, interesting phrases, and her severely just appraisal form the chief attractions of this volume."

Commenting on Bogan's criticism in New York Times, Thomas Lask declared that she "took a median position between the New Criticism at one end and sociological (or Marxian) criticism at the other. She refused to identify the poet with the historical processes of his age. . . On the other hand, she was not willing to strip the work down to its formal elements only, as if the poet was a disembodied muse living in no fixed time or place and without those idiosyncracies that made him what he was and no other. There is also little poking around in myth or in depth psychology." Lask found that Bogan's "manner was so quiet, her style so unemphatic that they sometimes obscured the force of her judgments. . . . She could be wrong and she could be disappointing in her pieces, which is to say that she was mortal. An exquisite and scrupulous craftsman with a leaning to order, she had a natural tendency to respond to formal workmanship."

"Louise Bogan is a great lyric poet," concluded Paul Ramsey in Iowa Review. "To say that some of her lyrics will last as long as English is spoken is to say to little. For since value inheres in eternity, the worth of her poems is not finally to be measured by the length of enduring. To have written 'Song for the Last Act,' 'Old Countryside,' 'Men Loved Wholly beyond Wisdom,' . . . and some dozens of other poems of very nearly comparable excellence is to have wrought one of the high achievements of the human spirit, and to deserve our celebration and our love."

CAREER

Poet and critic. Freelance writer in New York City, 1919-25; poetry editor, New Yorker, 1931-69. Visiting professor at University of Washington, Seattle, 1948, University of Chicago, 1949, University of Arkansas, 1952, Seminar in American Studies, Salzburg, Austria, 1952, and Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1964-65.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

• Body of This Death, McBride, 1923.
• Dark Summer, Scribner (New York, NY), 1929.
• The Sleeping Fury, Scribner, 1937.
• Poems and New Poems, Scribner, 1941.
• Collected Poems, 1923-1953, Noonday Press (New York, NY), 1954.
• The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968, Farrar, Straus (New York City), 1968.

OTHER

• Women, Ward Ritchie, 1929.
• Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (criticism), Henry Regnery (Chicago), 1951.
• (Translator) Yvan Goll, Elegy of Ihpetonga [and] Masks of Ashes, Noonday Press, 1954.
• Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry, Noonday Press, 1955.
• (With Archibald MacLeish and Richard Wilbur) Emily Dickinson: Three Views, Amherst College Press (Amherst, MA), 1960.
• (Translator with Elizabeth Mayer) Ernest Juenger, The Glass Bees, Noonday Press, 1961.
• (Translator) Goll, The Myth of the Pierced Rock, Allen Press (Lawrence, KS), 1962.
• (Translator with Mayer) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, Henry Regnery, 1963.
• (Editor and translator with Elizabeth Roget) Jules Renard, Journal, Braziller (New York, NY), 1964.
• (Editor with William Jay Smith) The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People, Reilly & Lee (Chicago), 1965.
• (Author of afterword) Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, New American Library (New York City), 1968.
• A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation, edited by Robert Phelps and Ruth Limmer, McGraw-Hill (New York City), 1970.
• (Translator with Mayer of verse) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella, Random House (New York, NY), 1971.
• What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970, edited by Ruth Limmer, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1973.
• Journey around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan, a Mosaic, edited by Limmer, Viking (New York, NY), 1980.
• Five Lyrics of Louise Bogan: For Mezzo-Soprano and Flute, Presser (Bryn Mawr, PA), 1984.
• (With Mildred Weston) Our Thirty Year Old Friendship: Letters from Louise Bogan, Conversations with Mildred Weston; and, Legacy: Poems from the Twenties to the Nineties / Our Thirty Year Old Friendship Legacy, with an excerpt from her interview with Leon Arksey, Eastern Washington University (Cheney, WA), 1997.

Also author of Works in the Humanities Published in Great Britain, 1939-1946: A Selected List, 1950. Contributor of verse to New Republic; contributor of literary criticism to New Yorker, Nation, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and Atlantic Monthly. The major collection of Bogan's papers is held at the Amherst College Library, Amherst, MA. The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, also has a significant collection of her papers.

FURTHER READINGS

BOOKS

• Bogan, Louise, Journey around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan, a Mosaic, edited by Limmer, Viking (New York, NY), 1980.
• Bogan, Louise, What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970, edited by Ruth Limmer, Harcourt, 1973.
• Bogan, Louise, and Mildred Weston, Our Thirty Year Old Friendship: Letters from Louise Bogan, Conversations with Mildred Weston; and, Legacy: Poems from the Twenties to the Nineties / Our Thirty Year Old Friendship Legacy, with an excerpt from her interview with Leon Arksey, Eastern Washington University (Cheney, WA), 1997.
• Bowles, Gloria, Louise Bogan's Aesthetic of Limitation, Indiana University Press (Bloomington), 1987.
• Collins, Martha, editor, Critical Essays on Louise Bogan, G. K. Hall (Boston), 1984.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit), Volume 2, 1974, Volume 39, 1986, Volume 46, 1988, Volume 93, 1996.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 45: American Poets, 1880-1945, 1986, Volume 169: American Poets since World War II, Fifth Series, 1996.
• Dodd, Elizabeth, The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck, University of Missouri Press (Columbia), 1992.
• Frank, Elizabeth, Louise Bogan: A Portrait, Knopf (New York City), 1985.
• Knox, Claire E., Louise Bogan: A Reference Source, Scarecrow (Metuchen, NJ), 1990.
• Middlebrook, Diane Wood, and Marilyn Yalom, editors, Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor), 1985.
• Parini, Jay, and Brett Millier, editors, The Columbia History of American Poetry, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1993.
• Ridgeway, Jacqueline, Louise Bogan, Twayne (Boston), 1984.
• Smith, William Jay, Louise Bogan: A Woman's Words, Library of Congress (Washington, DC), 1971.
• Upton, Lee, Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of Louise Bogan, Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA), 1996.
• Woodward, Kathleen, and Murray M. Schwartz, editors, Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis, Indiana University Press, 1986.

PERIODICALS

• Accent, winter, 1942, pp. 120-121.
• American Book Collector, September, 1986, pp. 31-36.
• American Literature, March, 1953, pp. 117-118.
• Atlantic Monthly, February, 1974, pp. 90-92.
• Books, May 30, 1937.
• Centennial Review, fall, 1992, pp. 557-572.
• Chicago Tribune, November 4, 1951.
• Commonweal, November 13, 1929, pp. 53-55.
• Iowa Review, summer, 1970, pp. 116-124.
• Kenyon Review, summer, 1985, pp. 9-20.
• Measure: A Journal of Poetry, October, 1923, pp. 15-19.
• Nation, April 24, 1937; November 15, 1941; May 22, 1954, pp. 445-446; December 27, 1980; pp. 710-712.
• New Republic, November 29, 1980, pp. 38-40.
• New York Herald Tribune Book Review, July 4, 1954, p. 5.
• New York Times, November 25, 1951; May 30, 1954; October 31, 1970, p. 27.
• New York Times Book Review, May 30, 1954, p. 6; November 7, 1965; October 13, 1968; January 4, 1981, pp. 4, 24.
• Parnassus: Poetry in Review, spring/summer, 1985, pp. 144-159.
• Saturday Review, April 18, 1937; April 25, 1942; July 3, 1954; December 24, 1955, p. 24; February 21, 1970.
• Sewanee Review, January-March, 1955, pp. 161-168; autumn, 1972, pp. 627-629.
• Southern Review, winter, 1983, pp. 73-87.
• United States Quarterly Book Review, March, 1952.
• Women's Studies, 5, 1977, pp. 131-135.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

• Antiquarian Bookman, February 16, 1970.
• Newsweek, February 16, 1970.
• New Yorker, February 14, 1970.
• New York Times, February 5, 1970.
• Publishers Weekly, February 23, 1970.
• Time, February 16, 1970.
• Washington Post, February 6, 1970.