The modernist poet Louise Bogan never wrote poetry easily or voluminously. Over her lifetime she published 105 collected poems, most of them written while she was in her twenties or thirties. The Sleeping Fury, published in 1937 when Bogan was forty years old, was her last book of new poems. She wrote no poetry from 1941 to 1949, and the Collected Poems, 1923–1953 added but three lyrics to the work gathered in Poems and New Poems, published in 1941. In her twenties Bogan was already contrasting her own writing blocks with Keats's "sitting down every morning and writing 200 lines, fully and easily" [What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920–1970, 1973; hereafter referred to as Letters]. In middle age she wrote poetry with still greater difficulty and infrequency, reaching an impasse that persisted for some thirty years, even while she remained active as a translator and critic until her death in 1970. "The woman who died without producing an oeuvre" was the harsh epitaph Bogan wrote for herself when still in her thirties; she was haunted by the possibility that history would remember her only for what she did not accomplish [Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan, 1980; hereafter referred to as Journey].

One reason for Bogan's small output, offered by many of those who have written about her, is strict standards of artistic excellence, which created an anxious perfectionism that approached self-censorship. Bogan felt, as she herself recognized, "the knife of the perfectionist attitude … at my throat" (Letters). But if such standards—based in a modernist, originally masculine aesthetic of impersonality—help account for Bogan's limited production overall, they do not in themselves explain the shape of her creative career, the decline and disappearance of poetry in her middle and late years. After all, Bogan worked in a modernist idiom from the start. In Louise Bogan's Aesthetic of Limitation, Gloria Bowles provides a more adequate explanation of the volume of poetry Bogan produced—or did not produce—at different stages of life. Along with the psychoaesthetics of perfectionism, Bowles cites biographical and vocational factors. The "burden" of Bogan's reviewing for the New Yorker, "her precarious psychological balance, her perfectionism, her sense of being unappreciated, and her idea of the innate limitations of the woman poet… combined to effectively put an end to her art in her early forties." All of these factors are comprised in Bogan's sense of the vocation of the feminine lyric poet, which was shaped by an ideology of youthful romantic love, traditionally both the subject matter of the feminine lyric and the source of the woman poet's inspiration. It is this sense of vocation that most directly enforced change over the course of her career. For what does such a complex of assumptions leave to the middle-aged feminine lyricist?

Bogan was one of a number of women writers of the 1920s, including Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, who redefined and modernized the feminine lyric. Their signature was established forms like the sonnet, and they retained the traditional concentration on intense personal feeling. In renewing the feminine lyric, however, they replaced celebrations of religious faith and the domestic sphere, predominant in poetry of the nineteenth century, with powerful sensual experience as the chosen means of transcendence. Bogan and her contemporaries still relied on love, but now it was the engine of physical sensation. Teasdale reported in a letter that she had set up a shrine to Aphrodite and declared, "She is more real to me than the Virgin." Whereas Eliot had advanced a universal, ideal order of European tradition, Bogan and her compatriots acknowledged a specific line of women's poetry leading into their own. Teasdale's anthology of love poetry by women, The Answering Voice, distills this tradition as it developed up to World War I, emphasizing idealistic yearning, disappointment, and memory. Although Bogan disdained the exaggerated posturing of sentimental nineteenth-century verse on the subject of love, she credited women with maintaining the line of feeling in American poetry against any exclusive modernist impulse toward irony and impersonality. Bogan identified herself with a lyric of emotion because it derived from the valid foundation of women's art: "Women's feeling, at best, is closely attached to the organic heart of life"; to women belonged the functions of "security, receptivity, enclosure, nurturance." Albeit ambivalently, Bogan accepted the sentimental tradition as one that sustained her own poetry. The headline of her obituary in the New York Times—"Louise Bogan, Noted Poet Who Wrote about Love, Dead"—dramatizes the extent to which she was identified with the one subject.

It was not a subject free from impediments. Indeed, Bogan's struggle as a writer was from the outset contingent on the identification of the female poet with heterosexual love, the well of feeling. Remarks in "The Heart and the Lyre," Bogan's evaluation of the female tradition, suggest why. Here she links strength of emotion with the feminine lyric gift: "In women, more than in men, the intensity of their emotions is the key to the treasures of the spirit." How and when could one find special strength of feeling? It was available in moments of crisis, in the throes of romance. Of "Zone," first published in Poems and New Poems, Bogan noted, "I wrote a poem … which derives directly from emotional crisis, as, I feel, a lyric must" (Journey). This belief, too, was an inherited feature of the feminine lyric; Teasdale, for example, placed herself in a tradition based in the inevitability of women's frustration in love. But the conviction that the lyric derives from moments of crisis creates difficulties in composition, for crisis is not a sustainable form of experience. As Malcolm Cowley emphasized, Bogan's theory made it impossible for her to write a great deal. Even in her youth, a reliance upon extreme feeling limited Bogan's opportunities to create poetry.

An aesthetic of romantic crisis does permit a certain production of poetry if one has a supply of crises—such as was provided to Bogan by her biography through her twenties. She was born in 1897 into an Irish Catholic family then residing in Livermore Falls, Maine. After several other shifts, her parents moved to Boston when she was still a young girl. Her mother was, in Bogan's account, a handsome but vain woman who derived her sense of identity through attracting the romantic interest of men, however fleeting and destructive. Her energies were compulsively channeled into a traffic in pleasure—the upkeep of her figure and dress, endless arrangements of liaisons. These sexual adventures dominated Bogan's life as a young girl. On one occasion she suffered an episode of blindness lasting two days; she was never able to recall what scene had precipitated this symptom. She was "the highly charged and neurotically inclined product of an extraordinary childhood and an unfortunate early marriage, into which last state [she] had rushed to escape the first" (Letters). Living with her family during her freshman year at Boston College, Bogan won a scholarship to Radcliffe but chose to marry Curt Alexander, a corporal in the army, rather than remain at home and attend college. Shortly after the marriage, Alexander was transferred to the Canal Zone, and Bogan, by this time pregnant, followed. She found the exotic Panamanian landscape "alien and hostile" and the marriage an even stranger threshold: "All we had in common was sex" (Journey). After the birth of their daughter, Alexander refused sexual relations with Bogan, and the marriage quickly deteriorated.

Like many other writers early in the century, Bogan turned cultural and personal disappointment into modernist poetry. Her first book, Body of This Death, published in 1923 and dedicated to her mother and daughter, takes as its subject women in the throes of love. The subject is fully traditional, but the results are not promising, for the volume finds that the literary life of feeling is one of depersonalization and disillusionment. Body of This Death studies the bourgeois family and marriage; the latter is sought to escape the former, but it proves an equivalent entrapment. Figures who seek to detach themselves from family through romantic passion discover that it provides no ultimate remedy. The mother's power over the daughter's fate frames many of her attempted escapes, and marital rites of passage fail. Women are identified with beautiful, often aestheticized, objects—stones, marble girls who hear "no echo save their own." The volume builds a spiral of betrayals, each ending in an image of arrest.

To love never in this manner!
To be quiet in the fern
Like a thing gone dead and still.
("Men Loved Wholly beyond Wisdom")

Female destiny is the experience of "being trapped—of being used, of being made an object" (Journey).

Body of This Death begins on a note of hope. Heterosexual consummation, romantic love, would be the means to Bogan's self-creation; sexual love and fertility would empower her. The book's lead-off poem, "A Tale," expresses a longing for love as a means of control, as well as transcendence in the manner of the feminine lyric. Bogan, in the person of the poem's youthful protagonist, hopes for "a land of change" away from the suffocatingly familiar props of her New England childhood. Outwardly she succeeds in severing ties to her family, breaking apart what had shut her in "as lock upon lock." But the allegiance to passion under conditions of inequality, what amounts to women's objectification in male desire, can be debilitating and cruel. The body, for all its sensory power, betrays women who are conventionally young and desirable in a man's world.

The metonymy of the mouth, rusted and partial, paves the way to the subjects of the last couplet. There the dehumanized "something and another" figure the depersonalizing effect of the youth's fate. "A Tale" initiates the pattern of sexual quest and failed release in Body of This Death. In the dramatic disappointment of Bogan's journey's end, we find the source of the projected landscapes:

Here I could well devise the journey to nothing,
At night getting down from the wagon by the black barns,
The zenith a point of darkness, breaking to bits,
Showering motionless stars over the houses.
Scenes relentless—the black and white grooves of a woodcut.
("A Letter," Journey)

The "withered arbor" in "Statue and Birds" is another sample of disillusionment, the statue representing the results of the transformation of strong experience into the lyric, the essence of Bogan's sense of her poetic process.

Here, in the withered arbor, like the arrested wind,
Straight sides, carven knees,
Stands the statue, with hands flung out in alarm
Or remonstrances.

Over the lintel sway the woven bracts of the vine
In a pattern of angles.
The quill of the fountain falters, woods rake on the sky
Their brusque tangles.

The birds walk by slowly, circling the marble girl,
The golden quails,
The pheasants, closed up in their arrowy wings,
Dragging their sharp tails.
The inquietudes of the sap and of the blood are spent.
What is forsaken will rest.
But her heel is lifted,—she would flee,—the whistle of the birds
Fails on her breast.

The marble girl occupies the center of the arbor, around which the birds slowly circle and from which they depart. Their motion is opposed to the marble girl's stasis; art as static perfection opposed to the freedom of the birds. Against their natural movements we can measure the girl's beautiful but frozen gesture.

The emphasis on "Here" suggests that the text we read, the poem, is also an arbor of sorts. It, too, is a sanctuary, a shady recess enshrining the female statue. But in the poem's process, the statue erodes as statue. It becomes "the marble girl" and finally the "she" of the closing stanza. This final pronoun is a composite of the statue and the depersonalized poet. The walls soften with the poet's late discovery of herself within them. Thus Bogan places her own female beauty in a withered arbor, suggesting an unnatural enervation, the loss of freedom for and by the figuration of art. Enshrinement in an artificial recess becomes another entrapment. The female statue suggests the aesthetic imperatives of Keats's Grecian urn: to attain final perfection, the marble girl must become "an object, in the double sense of being dead and also an object for aesthetic contemplation" [Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity]. In the marble girl's arrested form, Bogan encodes her own self-defeat and complicity within the tradition that objectifies women.

The persistence of the subject of love in the feminine lyric, whether in the traditional moods or with Boganian bitterness, exemplifies a dependence common among women on youthful heterosexual ties for self-definition. The rite of passage theme in "Betrothed" shows how thoroughly the conventional female of Bogan's period was still defined by heterosexual love relationships. The betrothal song, as a set piece of nineteenth-century poetry, celebrates a young woman's passage into marriage. Bogan represents the young woman as an elegiac figure of feminine dismay.

You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,
You have said my name as a prayer.
Here where trees are planted by the water
I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,
And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say.

My mother remembers the agony of her womb
And long years that seemed to promise more than this.
She says, "You do not want me,
You will go away."

In the country whereto I go
I shall not see the face of my friend
Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;
Together we shall not find
The land on whose hills bends the new moon
In air traversed of birds.

The lover's hands and mouth, placed or imposed on the female, silence rather than caress, and this imposed silence seems linked to the daughter's failure to deliver herself cleanly from her mother's womb. The "you" of "Betrothed" makes proprietary claims upon the female, wrenching possession from the mother. Thus the poem emphasizes the continuity of possession from mother to husband, from daughter to wife, "lock upon lock." It is through relationship with the husband that Bogan discovers the crucial fact about women's sexual identity: they are defined by their relations with others. The female's identity never stands alone, cut free from the mother's claims of birth or from the husband's future rights.

If love as subject connects Bogan's lyric to the nineteenth century, it is still possible to distinguish women's relationships during the period of Bogan's first publications from those prevailing in the nineteenth century. The poems in Body of This Death define a possessive love between unequal lovers. Although the woman is often absorbed and transformed by such love, she must give up friends, family, home, and landscape, even her prior sense of self, to achieve her exaltation. The 1920s, when Bogan's volume was published, saw a shift away from a greater identification of women with women in the nineteenth century. The invention of the category of homosexuality late in the nineteenth century stands as a watershed between the two periods, creating that which is proscribed. A contemporary indicator of this shift is a group of essays compiled in the Nation under the title These Modern Women. Attempting to ascertain what distinguished contemporary women's experiences, the essays describe a reorientation away from the homosocial ties of girlhood toward heterosexual relationships.

Perhaps the most economical means to sketch the cultural pressures prevailing in the 1920s is to show that the female lyric poet responded to what produced like results in two great contemporary film actresses, Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. Their appeal to the film audience—by means of beauty, passion, and suffering—resembled the specifications for the desired and desiring female in the lyric. Garbo personified glamour, sensual expression, and inaccessibility to the general audience, a version of the closed poem encoding sexual appetite. Her film characters sacrificed themselves—to one man, for love. Brooks, on the other hand, exemplified the unbridled pleasure principle. In critical tributes her acting is a matter of instinctual physicality: she "needed no directing, but could move across the screen causing the work of art to be born by her mere presence" [Kenneth Tynan, Show People]. Directors made similar observations about Garbo, believing she embodied what Roland Barthes in "The Face of Garbo" called the "lyricism of women." The impulse is to locate the basis of the actress's art in her youthful desirability. The same impulse exhibits itself in the critical response to lyric poets, whose art was the gesture of overflowing emotion. Their reception in the 1920s was not generally a matter of analysis; instead it was suffused in romance and infatuation. Many were celebrated beauties whose photographs accompanied their poems in print. Millay cut a romantic figure, rising to notice through public readings that captivated numbers of men, intensifying the propensity to collapse distinctions between poet and poetry. Wylie's much-publicized romantic life, in combination with the austere form of her beauty, was a considerable factor in the reception of her poems. In reviews, descriptions of her physical appearance and of her poems overlap.

Of course the most obvious ideal of physical beauty for women in this century has been youthfulness. As Lois Banner remarks [in American Beauty], "An unlined face, hair neither gray nor white, a slim body with good muscle tone have been the signs of beauty achieved." After the 1920s the focus on youth came to include sophistication, glamour, and experience; however, a deepening of sensual experience was still contained within a paradigm of youth and beauty. Garbo quit the screen at age thirty-seven; Brooks's career began before she was twenty-one and lasted but thirteen years. Withdrawal from the public eye was necessary for the actresses to preserve their images from the revisions that would have accompanied their aging. They grew older behind closed doors and sunglasses. The assumption that the aging body is, in Kathleen Woodward's phrase [in Aging and Its Discontents], the "sign of deformation" links these retirements to Bogan's career. In her medium Bogan was as deeply immersed in a process of youthful passion, a romantic objectification of women. The lyric, in the hands of young women, embodied qualities of youth—compression, intensity, passion, and longing—without the marks of decline associated with old age.

The allotted role of women poets, a concern with romantic love, satisfied Bogan's youthful sense of the kind of poetry she aspired to write, even if the outcome of love, as represented in Body of This Death, was destructive. Many writers embraced their identification with love, youth, and desirability because of the opportunities offered but never imagined their fate when they no longer were young. In Western culture, certain forms of power pass swiftly from the old to the young. Marketability in the positions historically open to women, from waitressing to acting, depends upon youthfulness. Women experience anxiety in aging because, quite simply, they may be superseded; women poets were troubled by the process of aging because it seemed to deny them their subject—passion. Valuing love, women poets of the period simultaneously valued youth. When Bogan arrived in middle age, she was faced with alternative prospects: to change the focus and process of her writing or to retire from poetry.

In her thirties Bogan suffered several emotional break-downs requiring hospitalization. She separated from and then divorced her second husband, survived her mother's death, and set up housekeeping as a single parent. The death of her mother, whom Bogan held responsible for her emotional turmoil, left much festering within the poet. At the same time, with her divorce Bogan relinquished once and for all the intensely inspiring yet potentially destructive romantic basis of her life. In the aftermath of her breakdowns and the dissolution of her two most crucial relationships, Bogan made concerted efforts on all fronts to establish her life on steadier, more cautious footing. In the words of "After the Persian": "I do not wish to know / The depths of your terrible jungle … / I am the dweller on the temperate threshold." She was a pensioner in the house of love no more.

I said out of sleeping:
Passion, farewell.
("Second Song")

Gone would be ecstasy; gone, too, despair. Bogan hoped that the emergence of what she called her "new personality," based on emotional stability and restraint, would lead to an increase in creative vitality. In stepping past the youthful framework of crisis, Bogan stepped into uncharted territory.

If woman's proper subject in the traditional lyric was love, what then was she to write about when she no longer loved? What is most interesting about Bogan's response is that she was so conscious of her position as a woman. She knew that women who wrote compressed lyrics suffered in comparison to male poets who kept writing into old age and produced large oeuvres. She keenly felt the contrast between Yeats's body of work and her own small group of poems. The male poet managed to write into late life, Bogan suggested, because he had a wider range of acceptable material and experience upon which to draw; he was not wed to young love. Rilke and Yeats achieved long and successful careers because "they drew to themselves more and more experience; their work never dried up at the source or bloated into empty orotundity" (Journey). But the course for older women poets was uncertain. Reviewing Millay's Huntsman, What Quarry? in 1939, Bogan broached the subject of the modernist woman poet's dilemma in relinquishing the youthful basis of her art: "It is difficult to say what a woman poet should concern herself with as she grows older, because women who have produced an impressively bulky body of work are few. But is there any reason to believe that a woman's spiritual fibre is less sturdy than a man's? Is it not possible for a woman to come to terms with herself, if not with the world … ?" (Journey). In this passage Bogan expresses doubt about the subjects possible for the woman poet writing after the period of youthful love. Perhaps she could draw more and more experience to herself; the matter is here left undecided. Bogan's uncertain tone—her inability to answer the question—shows that she was grappling with a new orientation in her career and a new basis to her poetry. She could conceptualize the necessity, but she could not specify new sources for her poetry.

There was a second problem in Bogan's passing the stage of romantic passion. Love was not just the subject of the feminine lyric; it was also poetry's inspiration. Bogan's reference to coming to terms with oneself suggests that a sturdy maturity of outlook might have taken the place of passionate love in the inspiration of poetry. But her work appears to have "dried up at the source" instead. This last image becomes a significant one in again comparing the woman's range to the man's. The endurance of male poets was related to the contemporary (but also ancient) belief in the conjunction of artistic and sexual energies. Bogan herself fused these two distinguishable energies by linking the sensations of romantic love, "the letting go, the swoon, the suffused eyes, the loose hand, the constriction in the throat, the abasement, the feeling of release," with what she called "le souffle du génie—the breath of inspiration" (Journey). Sexuality was further equated with the reproductive years, tying a woman's sexual life closely to childbearing. The end of the childbearing years was then construed as the withering of sexual desire, and men were thought to experience longer sexual lives than women, an assumption not widely questioned until the 1970s. If Bogan accepted these cultural presumptions, that women's procreative and creative lives were one and the same, then her career as a poet was linked to the reproductive aspects of female heterosexual life.

The drying up at the source, then, was menopause. The subject was itself taboo for Bogan and never broached directly; she referred to it obliquely or in jest. But from the comment made to her editor—"A woman writes with her ovaries"—and to Theodore Roethke—that women poets dry up at forty—it is clear that Bogan associated the onset of menopause with her inability to write poetry. The treatment of menopause by contemporary medical and psychoanalytic theorists as the breakdown of the sexual system must have affected the way she saw her sexuality at this stage of life. In medical and popular texts, menopause was represented as a pathological state, describing the "breakdown of a system of authority" [Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body], a process of failure and decline. This analysis depended on an emphasis on sexual production, beginning with the production of eggs, as women's physiological purpose. Under the common understanding, menopause deprived women of their purpose.

Each woman experiences menopause in her own way, but at the beginning of menopause, Bogan experienced the series of personal losses mentioned…. Thus her experience of a diminished sexual drive eroded the grounds of her authorship. Bogan was living alone, and her creative writing had slowed to a trickle. She possessed a premature sense of aging without fulfillments. She felt old—there is no other word for it. Journal entries from the period are a mournful testimony to how painfully Bogan felt time's passing. In reading them, one is continually shocked to realize they were written by a forty-year-old woman, for they seem the fearful meditations of someone much older. Bogan's career suggests that a system that ties creativity to reproductive capacity prevents a woman poet from growing throughout her life. Her response to middle life may be seen in "The Catalpa Tree," published in 1941 when Bogan was forty-four. In the poem, Bogan is greeted by a weakened voice of the ghost of her former self:

The failure of the invocation is clear, a full contrast to the authoritative onset of earlier poems ("Women have no wilderness in them"). The invocation associated with inspired writing now produces an empty litany of names. Even the natural details of the psychic landscape resist the poet's attention. Memory has been reduced to a failed talisman, "the pods of the catalpa tree that did not fall." What Bogan recalls are tears, unanchored to circumstances that confer meaning. She remembers feminine nurturance and the security of the house, the root of strength in women's art and lives, which appears as a protective enclosure. But the house has undergone a frightening transformation. The "web of thorns about it" joins the barrenness of autumn with the crown of martyrdom.

The second stanza develops the plot of declining powers. The speaker becomes a body part, the mouth of the "secret" and more authentic former poet, whose gifts have been buried. Traces of Bogan's old will to write survive in the pods spared from time, yet she cannot deploy them against loss. They seem saturated in an earlier season: "They hang in my song of another autumn." Sadness suffuses the scene and cannot be dispelled, and the impasse drains whatever energy the poem marshaled at the outset: "The tree was drained like a sieve." The present, an "hour stolen from sleep," suggests that Bogan's writing in midlife is a brief aberration from the narcotic of her days. The moment of life in poetry is now a rare and elegiac gift.

Bogan's response to the middle time of life was not the only one possible. But given the social conventions, the medical theories, and the literary portraits of middleaged menopausal women prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century, she was primed to view her own experience as a withering loss of sexuality and as an eroding of already narrowed creative impulses. She might have turned to a more forthright biographical style or the aesthetics of radical personal transformation averred by H. D. But the example of her lyric peers suggested a different course. Women like Millay peaked in their twenties. Millay's astounding early success took shape in love sonnets, and when she turned to social issues, for example the poem from 1927 on Sacco and Vanzetti, "Justice Denied in Massachusetts," critical estimation of her poetry sank. The Buck in the Snow, another departure from her earlier sonnets on love, was indifferently received. When she returned to the kind of poetry that made her reputation with Fatal Interview in 1931, the public was again happy.

Handicapped by the absence of a tradition of women lyric poets who had successfully negotiated the passage into middle life, Bogan had nothing to offset her self- or culturally imposed limits. The absence of an alternate tradition in women's poetry made it difficult for her and for other lyric poets of her generation to develop a late style. Having defined her inspiration as romantic love, an eroticism of physical sensation depending on male dominance and female abasement, Bogan found she could no longer fulfill that role. Sometime between 1932 and 1937, when she was in her late thirties, Bogan wrote: "Today it seemed as though nothing would ever happen again. Saw my real, half-withered, silly face in a shop mirror in the street, under the bald light of an evening shower, and shuddered. The woman who died without producing an oeuvre. The woman who ran away" (Journey).

During her period of creative silence, Bogan's professional life expanded into wider possibilities of teaching, lecturing, editing, and translating. She was the respected poetry critic for the New Yorker from 1936 until a few years before her death. In 1942 she became a Fellow in American Letters at the Library of Congress, and in 1944 she held visiting teaching positions at the University of Washington and the University of Chicago. Yet these increased possibilities did not revitalize what Bogan considered to be her real writing. She found herself split between a varied world of work, in which she was moderately mobile, and a private world that resisted change or new relationships. Even in the social, literary realm, Bogan had a relatively small number of close friends and correspondents, and over the course of her life few new friends were admitted. Nor did her tastes in writing or her views on the role of politics, for example, undergo much revision. Her personal life and her life as a poet both stalled.

Bogan was very conscious of herself as a writer of a particular age. After one of her breakdowns, Bogan remarked that "perhaps, in the main, the process of partial disintegration is salutary, and even necessary, when sensitive people reach their middle thirties. A good look into that abyss described by so many—Pascal, Dante, Sophocles, Dostoevsky, to name a few…. It's just as well to know that the ninth circle has an icy floor by experience: by having laid the living hand on it" (Journey). But Bogan's circumscribed conception of the shape of the lyric poet's career did not allow her to reshape her career in midlife. The female poet's career closely follows the conventionally constructed span of a woman's beauty and sexuality: "apprenticeship, a period of full flowering, and a gradual decline of creative energy" (Journey). In a passage I have already quoted, Bogan writes, "It is difficult to say what a woman poet should concern herself with as she grows older." In these remarks, Bogan expresses a sense of aging as a passage beyond productive youth. Absent is any conception of this time of life as a middle, a distinct period of creation. By contrast, a strong sense of a middle is given in the opening lines of Dante's Inferno: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ("Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood"). If beset by its own terrors, middle age can still be conceived as a period of creation perhaps more powerful than youth: ma per trattar del be ch'i' vi trovai, / diro de l'altre cose ch'i' v'ho scorte' ("But, to treat of the good that I found in it, I will tell of the other things I saw there").

There are, of course, many historical, aesthetic, religious, and personal factors that prevented Bogan from conceiving her career in the fashion of the medieval, Catholic, male, epic poet. Bogan's dilemma as a poet was aggravated by the circumstances of her life and by the purity of her aesthetic beliefs. The brevity of Bogan's active career shows us that a woman trying to come to terms with herself and with the world may not be aided by the recognized models of female aging. Like too many others, Bogan felt obliged to conform to cultural presumptions that denigrated her role in late life. When Bogan's romantic life diminished and a stage of her physiological life passed, she was prepared to believe that her creative life was ending too. Bogan's less frequent production after 1938 stemmed, at least in part, from her inability to circumvent the limitations of the female lyric poet as she understood her. In October 1938, after the publication of The Sleeping Fury, Bogan wrote, "I don't think I will write very much more" (Letters). And she did not.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a resistance to presumed decline in middle age becomes more likely for the female lyricist, yet it still demands a struggle against the conventions of waning passion. A prime example is Louise Glück, who has published several books of acclaimed poetry, among them The House on Marshland. This volume, from 1975, includes "To Autumn," a lyric in the great tradition of seasonal meditations on the poet's career. Glück writes from the vantage of one no longer young. But she offers a construction of survival into middle age counter to the phenomena of loss that prevail in "The Catalpa Tree." Glück confronts the conventional plot of a woman poet's middle age as a time of exhaustion and decline. She revises the division of a woman poet's career into youth, as the period of the most perfect expression, and age, as the emptying out into silence. To base a poet's development in seasonal structures suggests that a poet's career follows the cycles of growth and decay. But "To Autumn" refuses to reproduce the script that consigns women poets to silent hiding after the youth and beauty of their spring has subsided.

Morning quivers in the thorns; above the budded snowdrops
caked with dew like little virgins, the azalea bush
ejects its first leaves, and it is spring again.
The willow waits its turn, the coast
is coated with a faint green fuzz, anticipating
mold. Only I
do not collaborate, having
flowered earlier. I am no longer young. What
of it? Summer approaches, and the long
decaying days of autumn when I shall begin
the great poems of my middle period.

After the long, gentle lines evoking the first unfoldings of spring, Glück interjects herself into the scene. This rough cutting-in marks resistance: she will not follow the seasonal development as it is given to her. Glück does not labor with nature to produce its flowering. Instead she offers a developmental map of aging as a series of multiple locations through which she moves at will. At the start of what in the traditional lyric would be decline, Glück stakes her new beginning: "the long / decaying days of autumn when I shall begin / the great poems of my middle period." The poems of youth tantalize with delicacy, but the ripening of those powers in middle age results in great poems.

Unlike natural production, the endless reproducing of itself, a woman has a finite capacity for spring. A natural grid laid upon her life precludes her coming to terms with the processes of aging. Such an imposition reads a woman's creativity solely in terms of sexual reproduction. Therefore, the erotic life of nature cannot provide an adequate model for women's creative life in all its manifestations. Glück extends Keats's example of bestowing to autumn its own songs. But unlike Keats, she can claim the powers of autumn even during the spring. The woman poet produces in autumn and spring.

Born twenty years after the publication of Bogan's first book of poems, Glück must still overcome strictures on the feminine poet in order to write the lyric into middle age. She is able to refuse to internalize the customary attitude toward aging that stopped Bogan. But the very refusal evinces the endurance of residual assumptions about the shape of a woman poet's career.