SOURCE: "A True Inheritor," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 233, No. 2, February, 1974, pp. 90-2.

[Louchheim was an American poet, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following positive review of What the Woman Lived, she comments on Bogan's life and works.]

In a letter dated 1939, Louise Bogan expands an argument about Boswell and Johnson into a few epithets on life: "Aloneness is peculiar-making, to some extent, but not any more so … than lots of Togetherness I've seen."

Miss Bogan's aloneness was never peculiar, and always deliberate. A good deal of her seclusion was spent in carrying out one of her own dicta: "The least we can do, is to give a phrase to the post."

In the more than four hundred letters collected and edited by Ruth Limmer in What the Woman Lived, Miss Bogan managed to give us a stylish, clear, and entertaining literary history of the fifty years from 1920 to 1970.

Besides her addiction to aloneness, Miss Bogan practiced public reticence. She used many disguises, the chief of which was wit. In response to her publisher's (John Hall Wheelock of Scribner's) request for biographical material, she wrote: "I have a job reviewing books of poetry for The New Yorker [a position she held for thirty-eight years], I won a Guggenheim in 1933. I am wild about music, and I read everything but books on Grover Cleveland and novels called O Genteel Lady."

In a letter never mailed, she added irony: "My dislike of telling future research students anything about myself is intense and profound. If they know everything to begin with, how in hell can they go on eating up their tidy little fellowships researching?" Under the questionnaire's heading "Literary and social preferences," she wrote: "My social preferences range from truck and taxi drivers who make me laugh, locomotive engineers, when they are good-looking and flirtatious, delivery boys, and touching old people…." She also lists a few dislikes: "dirty finger-nails … well-bred accents … the professional literati of all ages, other women poets (jealousy!), other men poets, English accents, Yale graduates and bad writing and bad writers."

The facts of the matter were that Louise Bogan's first book of poetry was published in 1923 and her first critical review, on D. H. Lawrence, came out in the same year. And except for a brief period when she worked as an assistant in the St. Mark's Place public library (Marianne Moore was a member of the staff), filed index cards at Columbia University (a job found for her by Margaret Mead), and clerked in Brentano's, she gave her life to creating and commenting upon literature. All told there were six books of poetry (the final collection, still in print, is called The Blue Estuaries), three books of criticism (the last, A Poet's Alphabet, appeared posthumously in 1970), four volumes of prose translations, an anthology of poetry for young people, even a bibliography of English belles lettres during World War II, which she compiled while she was consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress.

A sizable body of work, and all of it of the highest quality, but how does one celebrate poetry which does not create philosophic structures, does not shock or shriek, does not break new technical trails? Her poetry is simply there. Existing within the long line of the English lyric, it speaks to demonstrate that time and fashion do not alter ultimate human concerns.

She would not kick up her heels to the rhythms of the Roaring Twenties, nor would she later lead parades for or against economic injustice, fascism, democracy, racial inequalities. That is not what poetry is about. As she said time and again—and she was the most gracefully lucid, learned, and unprogrammatic critic of her generation—poetry is sound, is rhythm, is memorable language.

Miss Bogan's talent was formidable. Her poetry alone would have more than satisfied anyone else's need for creative expression. The letters, one must assume, were written for her own entertainment, as well as that of friends. Impetuous, never restrained or cautious, full of capricious and diverting images, plus exhilarating cerebral pyrotechnics, they make for first-class theater.

"Get all the bear into your work!" she advised author May Sarton. "Get all the bitterness, too. That's the place for it"—advice she practiced with a fine flourish. She was not given to hedging. Virginia Woolf is accused of having "a very inhuman side … Her feminism was bound up with her fears." Ellen Glasgow is described as "a lending-library set-up." The G. Am. public (Great American public: the letters are sprinkled with abbreviations) "likes pompous spinsters to tell them what life is really like." Jane Austen is "the only English novelist that a poet can respect. She's clean and onto it all and witty."

Henry James constantly reappears until by the end of the book we have read through everything he ever wrote, along with Miss B's perceptive comments. He is at once described as "superb … I am enchanted by the absolute sureness in method" and attacked as "both impotent and afraid." Of Archibald MacLeish she said: "He has real talent, without any doubt, but he has been too friendly with Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, etc.; his ear is too good."

When Isherwood and Auden came to this country in 1940, she refused to meet them. Their politics bothered and their talents were not yet proven. By 1941, however, she wrote: "Auden is a swell person, complicatedness and all." In later years she liked to quote what Auden told her: "We should talk back to God; this is a kind of prayer." (When she died in 1970, Auden gave the eulogy at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.)

Miss Bogan could be tender. After an argument with a close friend, Rolfe Humphries (poet, classicist, and translator), she assuaged him: "At least you leave the most important part of me alone. We never quarrel about poetry, which after all … is a region of the mind; it just happens that it is the region wherein, at our best, we both live."

Besides her reticence, her delight in wounding wit, the pleasure she took in arguing, the notion that it was vulgar to sell herself, there was her very distinct Irish paranoia. The Irish, and she was very Irish, are "really forest dwellers," she wrote to Rufina McCarthy Helmer in 1937, "with all the forest-dweller's instincts, and … since, or when, the Irish forests disappeared, they all developed such a terrible neurosis, from being forced to be out in the open so much." In a letter to Edmund Wilson, she further elaborated the idea: "Good God, what a country this is! It's not a country, it's a neurosis. Never come here, when you are apt, or liable, to ideas of reference, or to other paranoid symptoms."

Miss Bogan's susceptibility to "ideas of reference" may have begun with "an extraordinary childhood and an unfortunate early marriage into which last state I had rushed to escape the first." Her second marriage, to Raymond Holden (minor poet and novelist), was a stormy one: "I was a demon of jealousy and a demon of fidelity too, morbid fidelity." Her struggles with recurrent depressions (several bouts in sanatoriums) led her to a philosophical conclusion: "No one is let be, we are all forced in some way. Only the truly miserable, the truly forlorn are not forced, they are left alone by a God who has forgotten them."

Miss Bogan was never forlorn, perhaps because she was severe with herself. In a letter to Rolfe Humphries she wrote: "We are all self-lovers to an almost complete degree. So—act only enough to get yourself a little something to eat, and a bed to sleep on, and a drink, and a bunch of flowers. Act only enough to get yourself a little bit of love."

Miss Bogan came upon love after her first bout of depression. To Harriet Monroe, founder and editor of Poetry magazine, she wrote: "I feel at once renewed and disinherited. Different people say different things. My doctor insists that I love; Robert Frost … recommends fear and hatred." She chose love. In a later letter to Edmund Wilson, she claimed to have been "made to bloom … by the enormous lovemaking of a cross between a Brandenburger and a Pomeranian, one Theodore Roethke…. He is very, very large and he writes very very small lyrics." Roethke was twenty-six and she was thirty-eight.

Their correspondence lasted more than thirty years. The letters illustrate vividly the enormous encouragement, advice, and help that Miss Bogan gave the struggling poet: "You will have to look at things until you don't know whether you are they or they are you." Roethke also suffered from recurrent depressions. She writes to him that loss of face is the worst thing that can happen to anyone: "I know, because I have lost mine, not once, but many times. And believe me, the only way to get it back is to put your back against the wall and fight for it. You can't brood or sulk or smash around in a drunken frenzy … if you smash yourself dead, they won't give a damn … it's the self that must do it. You Ted Roethke, for Ted Roethke. I Louise Bogan, for Louise Bogan."

Other love affairs are hinted at but in many of the letters she refers to her lifelong conviction that for her "work was the only panacea." In various forms, she rephrases this belief. To Morton Zabel, assistant editor of Poetry magazine, she wrote: "The one thing to remember is that intellectual curiosity and the life of the mind are man's hope."

The more than seventy letters to Zabel are full of carefully chosen details that illuminate the dailiness of place, people, and problems, as well as a record of the imaginative interchanges between two scholarly human beings. They are also a study of the tests and strengths of friendship—Miss B quarreled with Zabel when, rightfully, she suspected him of collecting her letters for possible posthumous use. In 1941 she wrote: "I think we ought to come right down to cases, and clear up a few matters, before either renewed friendship, or eternal silence…. I have finally come to realize that you are not treating the letters as a gay correspondence between friends, but as a collection … everything I write you is being put into a kind of coffin…. This realization must, of course, break my correspondence with you…. I'll write to people who think of me as a human being, and not as a museum piece."

What is important about Miss Bogan is all in the letters: her humanness, her intellectual powers, her depressions, her taste for the good life ("I do love tables, chairs, libraries, silk underwear, clean sheets, food cooked to order, paper and pencil and music"), her incorruptibility, her conspiratorial heritage. Her praise of Marianne Moore most nearly resembles a self-portrait: "A fine, firm, human and tough point of standing."

In the early sixties, she wrote to William Maxwell (a New Yorker editor): "The nearer one comes to vanishing, the stranger it seems." In a later letter, written from a sanatorium, she observed: "One evening, with a gibbous moon hanging over the city (such visions as we have!), like a piece of red cantaloupe, and automobiles showing red danger signals … I thought I had reached the edge of eternity, and wept and wept."

She had mastered terror, climbed over mountains of difficulties, and come out with her laughter intact. Her laughter could be diabolic. In one of the last letters she speaks of her inability to get going on the New Yorker piece. "I have decided, however, to mention the fact … that Anne Sexton is the first woman in history to have written a hymn to her uterus."

This was the woman both admired and feared. The Bogan tone in the letters, as in the poetry, is unmistakable. She seduces the ear.

As Theodore Roethke said, "Bogan is one of the true inheritors … and the best work will stay in the language as long as the language survives."

One suspects that Miss Bogan would have scoffed at the title What the Woman Lived. What the Woman Lived Through would at least have been accurate and she might have preferred it.