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Honored, during the course of her literary career, with...)
Honored, during the course of her literary career, with almost every major poetry award, Louise Bogan (1898-1970) was the poetry critic for The New Yorker for nearly forty years. The Blue Estuaries contains her five previous books of verse along with a section of uncollected work, fully representing a unique and distinguished contribution to modern poetry over five decades.
(Excerpt from Body of This Death: Poems
This youth too lo...)
Excerpt from Body of This Death: Poems
This youth too long has heard the break Of waters in a land of change.
He goes to see what suns can make From soil more indurate and strange.
He cuts what holds his days together And shuts him in, as lock on lock: The arrowed vane announcing weather.
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Although best known as a master of the formal lyric poe...)
Although best known as a master of the formal lyric poem, Louise Bogan (1897- 1970) also published fiction and what would now be called lyrical essays. A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan showcases her devotion to compression, eloquence, and sharp truths.
Louise Bogan was poetry reviewer for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years, and her criticism was remarkable for its range and effect. Bogan was responsible for the revival of interest in Henry James and was one of the first American critics to notice and review W. H. Auden. She remained intellectually and emotionally responsive to writers as different from one another as Caitlin Thomas, Dorothy Richardson, W. B. Yeats, André Gide, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Bogan’s short stories appeared regularly in magazines during the 1930s, penetrating the social habits of the city as well as the loneliness there. The autobiographical element in her fiction and journals, never entirely confessional, spurred some of her finest writing. The distinguished poet and critic Mary Kinzie provides in A Poet’s Prose a selection of Bogan's best criticism, prose meditations, letters, journal entries, autobiographical essays, and published and unpublished fiction.
Louise Bogan won the Bollingen Prize in 1954 for her collected poems. She is the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan: A Portrait.
Louise Marie Bogan was an American poet, writer, and critic. She was a poetry reviewer for the New Yorker magazine from 1931 to 1969.
Background
Louise Bogan was born on August 11, 1897, in Livermore Falls, Maine, United States, the daughter of Daniel Joseph Bogan, who held various white-collar jobs in paper companies, and Mary Helen Shields. Bogan spent her childhood in New England mill towns. Her family was not a happy one, and Bogan found refuge from constant domestic turmoil in Grimm's Fairy Tales and adventure stories.
Education
In 1907, Bogan spent a year at Mount St. Mary's Academy in Manchester, N. H. In 1909 the family moved from Ballardvale, Massachussets, to Boston, where, from 1910 to 1915, Bogan received a rigorous classical education at Girls' Latin School. After graduating from high school, Bogan spent one year at Boston University (1915 - 1916).
Career
At fourteen Bogan began to write, and by seventeen she had become an accomplished metrist in the style of Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, and Christina Rossetti. Bogan began to publish her poems in 1917 and by 1921 was contributing frequently to the New Republic, the Measure, the Liberator, and other small magazines. After a six-month sojourn in Vienna in 1922, she published her first book, Body of This Death (1923), which established her as one of the foremost lyric poets of her generation. She began friendships with the critic Edmund Wilson and the poet Rolfe Humphries.
Bogan's second book, Dark Summer (1929), contained her two longest poems, "The Flume" and "Summer Wish, " in addition to shorter lyrics that, according to the critic Yvor Winters, demanded comparison with the best songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the spring of 1931, shortly after publishing her first poetry review for the New Yorker, Bogan sought hospital treatment for depression. She recovered with a new outlook of acceptance and reconciliation, sentiments captured in the poems of The Sleeping Fury (1937).
In the late 1930's, Bogan became a vigorous and outspoken opponent of political cant, especially on the Left, and in reviews and essays she persistently upheld the autonomy of art and the freedom of the artist. The light verse of Poems and New Poems (1941) took a satiric view of the current scene. From 1942 to 1948, Bogan did not write a single poem. She occupied the chair in poetry at the Library of Congress in 1945-1946, and in 1948 she began a new career as a teacher with visiting lectureships at the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Chicago. In 1948 she also collaborated on a translation of Goethe with Elizabeth Mayer; in later years, she translated Valéry with May Sarton, and Jules Renard with Elizabeth Roget. Bogan also published a brief critical history, Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (1951); Collected Poems, 1923-1953 (1954); and Selected Criticism: Poetry and Prose (1955).
As a critic, Bogan emphasized maturity in the artist, the work, and the age. Her essays on Yeats, Rilke, James, and Auden are major contributions to the criticism of these writers. Her judgments are clear, detached, and marked by insight, humor, and generosity, qualities equally evident in her letters to Rolfe Humphries, Edmund Wilson, Morton Dauwen Zabel, Theodore Roethke, William Maxwell, and May Sarton. Throughout the 1950's and 1960's, Bogan continued to write reviews for the New Yorker, to teach, and to work sporadically on her memoirs. Writing few poems, she nevertheless produced important lyrics in her later years, including "Song for the Last Act, " "After the Persian, " "March Twilight, " and "Psychiatrist's Song. "
A visit to Boston in 1965 revived painful childhood memories that precipitated a severe depression from which she never fully recovered. Her final collected edition, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, was published in 1968. Living in increasing seclusion, Bogan resigned from the New Yorker in 1969, after an association of thirty-eight years. She had only recently approved the text of her collected criticism, A Poet's Alphabet (1970), when she died in New York City. Often placed in the tradition of seventeenth-century metaphysical verse, Bogan's austere, formal lyrics have traditional themes. Yet, her treatment of them is thoroughly modern, nourished by symbolist aesthetics, twentieth-century views of the unconscious, and the concerns of Yeats, Rilke, Eliot, and Auden.
"She was a handsome, direct, impressive, vulnerable woman. In whatever she wrote, the line of truth was exactly superimposed on the line of feeling. " - William Maxwell
Connections
On September 4, 1916, Louise married a young army officer, Curt Alexander, and accompanied him to the Panama Canal Zone, where their only child was born. After one separation, she left Alexander permanently, and at his death in 1920 she had been living alone in New York City for at least a year. In July 1925 she married the poet Raymond Peckham Holden. After spending most of 1926 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to improve Holden's health, the couple bought a fruit farm in Hillsdale, New York, where they moved in 1928. After traveling in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1933, she returned home to find her marriage broken. She and Holden were divorced in 1937.