chaotic world, and so the betrayal was all the more painful. She describes angry tears, disillusionment, and dismay. Bogan’s reaction was extreme, but this disillusionment, coupled with all the chaos and betrayal of her early life, eventually led a very young Bogan to marry an unsuitable older man as a means of escape. She did not write of the marriage in her autobiography, but when asked what she has sought in her life, she replied that she sought love. She explains that she has sought love because she “worked from memory and example.” Her mother constantly sought reassurance of her own worth in love affairs, and Bogan experienced her father’s anger and the fighting between parents. Bogan writes in her autobiography how all the agony of her childhood “has long been absorbed” into her work. It is this absorption of agony that Bogan captures and reveals in “Words for Departure.”

In her essay “Lethal Brevity: Louise Bogan’s Lyric Career,” Marcia Aldrich says, “[l]ike many other writers early in the century, Bogan turned cultural and personal disappointments into modernist poetry.” In her discussion of Body of This Death, Aldrich charges that the subject of “women in the throes of love” is a traditional one for poets, but that in this instance “the volume finds that the literary life of feeling is one of depersonalization and disillusionment.” The poems in Body of This Death provide no happy endings, as the title certainly suggests. The poems contained within, according to Aldrich, “define a possessive love between unequal lovers.” This critique is certainly true of “Words for Departure.” In the poem, it is the male lover who holds all the power. Regardless of the depth of her love for him, the speaker cannot prevent his leaving. All control rests with the male lover and not with the female narrator, and as Aldrich suggests, these lovers are unequal. And yet, as Christine Colasurdo notes in “The Dramatic Ambivalence of Self in the Poetry of Louise Bogan,” Bogan’s poems are not victim poems. Colasurdo suggests that “What appear to be victim poems are in fact celebrations of the self’s emergence from family constraints, failed love, and rigid gender roles.” Bogan is a woman who has survived her family and her husband. It is not easy for Bogan to reveal herself, and as Colasurdo observes, Bogan was “a poet who vigorously avoided self-display in her life and work.” And yet, she is a poet who also created poems that use the language of suppression and silence.

Although Bogan does use the language of selfsuppression, especially in her multiple uses of the word “nothing” in “Words for Departure,” she also reveals the painful experience of love, especially in the last line of the poem: “Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.” As a child and as a young wife, Bogan experienced many departures. Her ambivalence at these many comings and goings is part of what creates so much tension in her poetry. In his essay “The Re-Making of a Poet: Louise Bogan,” Lee Upton points out that Bogan seems to present “a closed face” to critics. Consequently, Bogan emerges as stern and limited and perceived as a poet who depicts “female victims without imagining a more compelling conception of women.” Noting that Bogan’s poems are “profoundly oppositional,” Upton explains that “[s]eparation rather than unity propels her poetics.” In “Words for Departure,” a lover leaves. He also leaves behind anger, grief, and betrayal. These are mismatched lovers; one, perhaps a man, but equally possibly a woman, is secretive. This lover is the “rind”; nothing is known of the interior, what this lover is feeling or thinking. This lover has mysteries to unlock, words and feelings that remain hidden. The other lover is the opposite, the interior, the “white-juiced apple”; everything is known and nothing is hidden. As Bogan notes in her autobiography, separations, secrets, and deception defined her childhood. Her poetry is charged with her personal story of betrayal. Bogan, whose public “closed face” gives away nothing of her personal life, gives voice to a lover’s betrayal in “Words for Departure.” Her mother had “her fantasies, her despairs, her secrets, her subterfuges.” She was like the rind, the lover whose secrets and whose departure brings such pain.

Upton also indicates that it is Bogan’s position as an outsider that leads to many of the oppositional forces found in her poems. Bogan writes in her autobiography that she was “a member of a racial and religious minority.” She knew this from a young age; she experienced the bigotry directed against Irish Catholics, and she understood that she “was a ‘Mick,’” regardless of her other “faults or virtues.” Her status as an outsider, says Upton, can be found in her poetry: “[d]ivided voices dominate her work and require that we read her poems not as simple polemics but as explorations of multiple levels of psychological crisis.” The opposition noted in “Words for Departure,” the countering of “Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten,” the repetition of this parallelism throughout the poem—these are Bogan’s divided voice. She creates divisions and breaks in unity in her poetry, just as her life was a series of moves, separations, betrayals, and broken attachments. In exploring meaning in Bogan’s poetry, Upton suggests that for Bogan “separation became a means of survival.” While still quite young, she removed herself from her parents and husband and even her young daughter, and moved to New York City to live on her own. This leaving is what she understands as normal, given her own childhood experiences.

Bogan, who had so little control over her childhood existence, tried as an adult to control her own life. In her essay “Music in the Granite Hill,” Deborah Pope suggests that the women in Bogan’s poems “struggle to establish a sense of selfhood and control over their emotional and social environments, which constantly operate to defeat them.” Pope proposes that “Words for Departure” is part of a poetic sequence that reveals the emotional turmoil of Bogan’s failed marriage. As Pope also notes, with so much turmoil in her own early life, Bogan sought control in her poetry. “Words for Departure” reveals a stasis in the poet’s world. Each movement of the poem is balanced; lines and phrasing are parallel, the oppositions counterpoised and the symmetry clear. Nothing is out of control, and yet, one lover is leaving and another is in pain. Yet even that inequity is equal. The lover does leave, but the other lover assumes control also. It is this lover’s voice that is heard in the poem and this lover who demands that her lover leave in the dark. It is the abandoned lover who issues warning and it is this lover who commands the reader’s attention. Like Bogan, this lover is a survivor. Upton suggests that Bogan’s poetry “explores the unconscious dynamics of women’s experience.” It may also reveal the dynamics of Bogan’s own life.

Source: Sheri E. Metzger, Critical Essay on “Words for Departure,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

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” (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).

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 selfcensorship. 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 middleaged feminine lyricist?

The Traffic in Pleasure: Early Careers

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 Poem 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 leadoff 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.

nothing dares
To be enduring, save where, south
of hidden deserts, torn fire glares
On beauty with a rusted mouth.
Where something dreadful and another
Look quietly upon each other.
(“A Tale”)

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.” 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.” 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 muchpublicized 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, “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, 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.

Source: Marcia Aldritch, “Lethal Brevity: Louise Bogan’s Lyric Career,” in Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, edited by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen, University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 105–20.

Reputation, that fitful wind, changes direction often for a poet. After poets die their reputations may shift even more wildly; for whether poets are born or made, surely they are remade by their critics. Louise Bogan’s is a curious case in point. Although respected by her peers and in later life at last highly awarded, she nevertheless remains absent or nearly so from many contemporary discussions of modern poetry. Yet although this poet is not fully secured within descriptions of the modernist project, in recent years some measure of attention has been directed to her work. Surely Elizabeth Frank’s meticulous biography has generated increased interest. Martha Collins has gathered the central critical essays on the poet and places critical reaction in focus, and a number of other readers have constructed analyses that reevaluate Bogan, particularly in regard to feminist issues. Ruth Limmer’s “mosaic” of Bogan’s autobiographical writing has been of inestimable value, and Jacqueline Ridgeway has written a useful introduction to this poet. In turn, Gloria Bowles has written a study that argues for Bogan as a “major modernist” (1). Deborah Pope includes a chapter on Bogan in her exploration of isolation in women’s poetry, and Mary K. DeShazer has written compellingly of Bogan’s muse.

Yet, despite re-evaluations of Bogan’s poetry, many discussions have begun to form an edifice that may compromise our appreciation of her work. Her poems, challenging and resistant to much interpretation, remain displaced by an image of their creator, a woman whose proclivities were, in such readings, poised against her own growth. As Martha Collins suggests, we must freshly attempt to understand the “pleasure” that these poems may arouse (20). Unfortunately, Bogan too often appears in critical narratives as the joyless negative of the feminist poet and a maimed point of departure for the woman who is a poet today. In her seemingly cool and highly ordered art, it would seem that Bogan presents a closed face and a brittle completion. This, at any rate, is the poet who has emerged, early as well as late, in many estimations.

In much of the earliest criticism, Bogan is placed (even when compared with female contemporaries) as largely an exception among women. Allen Tate’s discussion may serve as an example: “Women, I suppose, are fastidious, but many women poets are fastidious in their verse only as a way of being finical about themselves. But Miss Bogan is a craftsman in the masculine mode” (41– 42). In his review of Dark Summer, Louis Untermeyer argues that the book’s “quality lifts it high above the merely adequate writing published in such quantities by women in these so literate states” (36). In the most often cited account of Bogan’s poetry, Theodore Roethke similarly chooses to make her an exception to her sex. After running through the supposed faults of women poets, including “lamenting the lot of the woman; caterwauling; writing the same poem about fifty times, and so on,” he argues that “Louise Bogan is something else” (87). What that “something else” might be has puzzled critics before and since.

In more recent critical reconstructions, the criticism I am particularly interested in here, Bogan appears problematic for reasons that, paradoxically, prove similar to those which Tate, Untermeyer, and Roethke establish. In the re-making of the poet, Bogan again serves as an exception of sorts, an isolated and unusually gifted poet, yet one removed from healthy self-affirmation, excluded not only by patriarchy but limited, as Gloria Bowles in particular argues, by her own internalization of male modernism’s disdain of women’s poetry and rejection of “‘female emotion’” (1). The Louise Bogan of much recent criticism would seem a victim identified with her oppressors, narrow and yet intent on universalizing her themes, devoted to a male structure of values, and yet confined within the lyric as women’s traditional province. In different mixtures, such criticism reconfigures Bogan through three principal positions. First, there is a tendency to view her work through metaphors of ingestion, particularly in terms of a suspect growth, the cancer of an internalized male value system that consumes her scope and accomplishment; second, there exists a critical repulsion from Bogan’s autobiographical reticence, a reticence that counters that strain within Anglo-American feminist criticism which prizes directness and sincerity; and, finally, there arises an evolutionary frame placing Bogan as a stern and repressed ancestor from whom contemporary poets must diverge in style and viewpoint.

The construction of Bogan’s poetry in the light of self-consumption may be especially revealing. We might consider Deborah Pope’s analysis. Pope describes Bogan’s poetry written after her first book, Body of This Death (1923), as “distrustful, cynical. . ., built on a reduction of the human and natural landscape” (40). Bogan’s work is described as “a poetry of no return” (52) in which the poet makes “femaleness itself . . . a constitutional flaw” (Separate 10). Repeatedly the poet is viewed as distanced from her actual body and victimized by an alien value structure which she has, in a sense, internalized. As a consequence, Bogan and her poetry would seem to have little “body” left: “Tragically, what seems least to fit [in this poetry] is the female body itself” (Separate 52). In somewhat similar terms, Patrick Moore begins his essay by remarking that “Styles are symptoms” (67) and finds much of Bogan’s poetry to be “a wasteland of anxiety and repression.” Furthermore, he argues that “true feelings are blurred by symbol, distanced by masks, muted by form.” Hers is a style, he observes, that is “rare, if not impossible, in a feminist poet” (79). Dominating these symptoms is a suspect “maleness,” a value structure which dismisses women’s achievement and constrains Bogan to a dubious goal of masculinized perfection. Although sensitive to and appreciative of many elements in Bogan’s poetic, Bowles maintains that Bogan’s poetry proves “an extreme example of a woman’s internalization of male ideas of the woman poet” (2). In her turn, DeShazer, despite her sympathetic treatment of Bogan’s poetry and a revisionary account of the poet’s employment of silence, finds her subject to be similarly problematic because of “a male-defined concept of the woman artist . . . ” (46).
A word frequently heard in many estimates is “limitation.” Bogan’s body of just over 100 poems, her conception of the woman poet’s role, and her refusal of self-disclosure are summoned in recent criticism as limitations. Earlier critics also found the concept of limitation to be a useful one. Over fifty years ago Allen Tate depicted Bogan as a poet who practices “a strict observance of certain limitations” (42). Yvor Winters described her “subjectmatter, or rather attitude” as “central . . . as any attitude so limited could be” (33). On a less ambiguous note, Lewellyn Jones argued that Bogan pits her poetry “against the limitations, imposed and self-imposed, on women; and at the same time [creates] a cry for something positive, for something compelling” (27). More recently, Bowles titled her study Louise Bogan’s Aesthetic of Limitation, defining the poet’s working practice as limitation, or “a strict idea of what a woman poet could and could not permit herself” (1).

Repulsion toward Bogan’s insistence on privacy further focuses criticism. Although actual autobiographical circumstances are purged or seldom become part of Bogan’s working materials, such omissions of the personal strike critics as repressive. Bowles argues that Bogan’s “compacted forms, her suppressions and obscurities, are her declaration of the near impossibility—even in the twentieth century—of being both woman and poet” (51–52). Implicit in such criticism is an appetite for revealed context and direct autobiography. In her turn, Pope maintains that Bogan’s poems reflect “the exclusion and suppression of any nature and life that does not fit her frame” and declares that Bogan developed “a style and stance pared to the bone: the granite hill that is both imprisoning and terrible” (Critical 165).

In other discussions, Bogan’s poetry serves as symptomatic of oppression, and the poet becomes a deadening ancestor in an evolutionary struggle. Bogan is reduced to a variation of the critic’s theme of isolation in Pope’s study. Representing victimhood, her work is characterized by “powerless and extreme bitterness,” “alienation from the body,” and “a posture of renunciation” (Separate 10). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, drawing on Bowles and a brief portion of Bogan’s correspondence, consign her situation to that of a “paradigm.” As such, the poet is rhetorically effective, a trope for women’s repressive past and “self-loathing” (xxiii). Bogan then becomes a disempowered figure, a doomed ancestor in an evolutionary struggle whose supposed failure in self-affirmation serves as a point of departure for theory.

In another brief discussion that presents Bogan emblematically, Paula Bennett follows an evolutionary rubric. Bennett examines the emergence of Medusa in women’s poetry—the mythological figure upon whom one of Bogan’s central poems focuses. Bennett argues that women poets validate through Medusa “those aspects of their being that their families and society have invalidated by treating such qualities as unfeminine and unacceptable” (246). Recast in contemporary poetry, Medusa becomes Bennett’s symbol of self-empowerment. Yet such an empowered self is seen as beyond the focal experience of Bogan. In fact, Bogan’s “Medusa,” the earliest poem that Bennett draws upon, emerges in her analysis as devoid of “life” and “tragically appropriate for a poet of extraordinary gifts who believed only 105 of her poems worthy of permanent record and who appears to have despised the very idea that she might be considered a woman poet” (247). In Bennett’s brief discussion, Bogan becomes a psychological victim of the gorgon’s paralysis. Citing a contemporary poet whose poem on Medusa “hurts to read” and reveals “ugliness,” Bennett casts Bogan (whose poems apparently do not impress upon Bennett their own rage) as a petrified specimen of repression. In an extension of the critical emphasis on symptoms, she argues that the new woman poet must “heal the internal divisions that have historically distorted and controlled her relationship to her craft.” As such, Bogan’s exploration of psychological rupture awaits a redemtive “healing.” Repeatedly, Bogan emerges as a bad patient of sorts, recalcitrant to the medicine of acceptance and neglectful of “the true self within” (6).

In such discussions, a strangely split figure arises. Particularly in the analyses of Pope and Bennett, Bogan becomes an exemplar of repression despite her considerable achievement. Lingering behind their criticism is a ghost image of a projected Louise Bogan—a healed and generous figure, a foremother whose “true self within” might emerge at last.

Through such reconstructions, Bogan assumes the position of a stern, limited (and limiting) predecessor. She is perceived as internalizing maleness, circumscribing her own emotional range, and depicting female victims without imagining a more compelling conception of women. Yet such descriptions of Bogan’s poetry fail fully to contend with the vital complexity of her poetics. The challenge of her work is more often commented upon rather than contended with in much recent discussion, and ultimately Bogan becomes a figure virtually encased within an oppressive past. Nevertheless, we should note that Bogan’s subject matter remains crucial and, indeed, fruitfully disturbing for contemporary readers and particularly for poets who might find her example of striking use. The subjects of violent stasis, betrayal, unity and rupture, gender impositions, and release from obsession (the latter most clearly within her final poems, laboriously wrested from silence) inform her poetry.

Beginning with an examination of threatening violence and pervasive separation in her first book, Body of This Death, published when she was twenty-six, Bogan creates an arena in which an externalized and oppressive force must be withstood. She invests in a poetics that exposes difference. While we might here explore a number of features in her work—her investigation of repression and her investment in counter-violence, for instance— in this context I wish to call attention in brief form to Bogan’s animated separations, her poetics of rupture and difference.

Bogan’s poetry is profoundly oppositional. Separation and juxtaposition are her methods of composition. As in one of her earliest poems, “A Tale,” she too “cuts what holds [her] days together / And shuts [her] in, as lock on lock” (3). The act of separating yoked conceptions creates “A fine noise of riven things” (5). Separation rather than unity propels her poetics. Separation clarifies by making extreme, and as such reveals modes of alienation, especially between women and men. In particular Bogan is interested in the exclusion of men from women’s intimate concerns. In other contexts separation serves to revive psychological health, for separation proves a means to disengage from oppressive forces. Most often her emphasis on separation does not prove inviting, but resistant, and Bogan’s poetry cannot readily comfort its critics. She creates divisions between self and reader that might in some ways account for the critical unease toward her work—a poetry that is itself a form of criticism in its avidity for distinctions. Unless we invert our usual categories of response, her poems would repel our readings. Separation, rather than unity, is a perceived good—a good that has consequences for the ways in which we may read and respond to this poetry.

An early poem, “The Alchemist,” is especially important for what I am suggesting as a means of perceiving Bogan—realizing that I too am asking for a “re-making” of this poet’s reputation, yet one that I hope may avoid collapsing her work into a trope for oppression. In the poem, the alchemist-poet experiments upon herself through a willed separation between body and mind. When her experiment fails to meet her expectations, she must make another discovery: “unmysterious flesh.”

I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind’s avid substance—still
Passionate beyond the will.

Significantly, the alchemist’s rediscovery of her flesh proves her reward, for by violently attempting to sever mind from body she is returned to the province of her own desires. In dyadic thinking the flesh’s alliance with the feminine suggests that the triumph of the flesh in “The Alchemist” is, at last, a triumph for the feminine itself. Bogan rejects the cultural repudiation of the body and, as a consequence, the cultural rejection of women’s bodily selves as desiring subjects. In other poems ironically inviting chastity and at least superficially resisting bodily desire, Bogan suggests that the flesh as female province continually must be recovered. As an alchemy of sorts, her depiction of extremes is carried out experimentally.

In her frequent sense of exclusion from her contemporaries, in her exile as a woman in patriarchal culture, and in her ethnic (Irish-American) selfconsciousness, Bogan presents us with divided responses. She declares in her essay, “The Springs of Poetry,” that the poet “should be blessed by the power to write behind clenched teeth, to subsidize his emotion by every trick and pretense so that it trickles out through other channels, if it be not essential to speech,—blessed too, by a spirit as loud as a houseful of alien voices, ever tortured and divided with itself.” Divided voices dominate her work and require that we read her poems not as simple polemics but as explorations of multiple levels of psychological crisis. Her explorations do not simply embody the dominant aesthetic. For all their classic order, her poems attest to the lyric as a province for creative struggle and creative rupture. She proves a poet deeply aware of the ways in which male and female experience may be culturally segregated. And she is aware as well of the ways in which romantic symbiosis thwarts intimacy. In another context Bogan writes that “Women still have within them the memory of the distaff and the loom—and, we must remember, the memory of the dark, cruel, wanton goddesses. But because woman rarely has gone over, in the past, to a general and sustained low complicity or compliance in relation to her companion, man, we can hope for her future” (Journey). Against a “sustained low complicity,” Bogan erects the poem.

The aesthetic technique of separation is particularly evident in this poet’s most controversial poem “Women.” If a body of work could be said to contain a culprit, “Women” is that perversely seductive culprit, for readings of the poem have contributed to a calcified presentation of Bogan’s poetics as inimical to women. Nevertheless, the poem refuses a stable position—which may in some measure account for a plethora of contradictory readings. The poem might be viewed as a burlesque of gender, a broadside of self-hatred, a declaration of difference, a critique of culture, a disguised rebuttal to men, and, of course, as a savage criticism of women. No doubt the poem retains its power because it holds such possibilities in tension, refracting its conceptual hues broadly for each reader. The poem may be seen as compelling for its aesthetically sustained framing of the assignment of women’s and men’s roles in culture and especially for its enactment of the externalization of male presence within women’s lives:

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry,
As like as not, when they take life over their doorsills
They should let it go by.

Frequently, “Women” has been cited as symptomatic of Bogan’s adoption of assumptions that denigrate women. Pope finds the poem “devastating” (Separate 10) and argues that Bogan proposes “the utterly bleak proposition that women are by gender unable to love, to move, to be free, that it is neither landscapes, partners, nor roles, but women’s very selves that are ultimately ‘the body of this death’” (Critical). Elizabeth Frank suggests that the poem depicts women as “by nature tinged with defective wills” and cites the poem for “its obvious envy of maleness” (67). Taking a different tack altogether, Ronald Giles proposes an ironic reading, noting that Bogan’s speaker “while appearing to catalogue the inadequacies of women, actually ridicules the accepted superiority of men” (34). The speaker shows women to be “provident, sentient, benevolent,” and “more sophisticated” than men (40). Giles’s reversals call attention to the poem’s ostensible values (“If men can think ‘of so many crops to a field’ or of ‘clean wood cleft by an axe,’ so what?”) (39). While his essay counters critics who present the poem as emblematic of Bogan’s sympathies with patriarchy, Giles’s reading strains the poem’s rhetoric and largely overlooks its genuine denunciation of women’s acculturated status. Although the poet’s position as a woman problematizes our reception of the poem, her gender may not annul her actual uneasiness about women’s status. While Bogan is an accomplished ironist, objections to women’s strategies of accommodation inform the poem and provide for much of its critical power.

Bogan interrogates women’s physical, emotional, and social positions. In the logic of the poem, women occupy an internal realm, men an external one. Ironically, as the poem’s assumed “other,” men, like women, “have no wilderness in them,” for their activities revolve around rural domesticating occupations; they tend cattle, plant fields, chop wood. Although representing the feminine gender superficially as “content in the tight hot cells of their hearts,” she portrays discontent and restless sensitivity on women’s parts: “they hear in every whisper that speaks to them / A shout and a cry.” The object of their love (presumably men) cannot satisfy, for the love men offer proves “an eager meaninglessness.” The suggestions of maleness (is men’s love the “dusty bread” women eat in their cells? Are men simply to be “let . . . go by?”) are specific only in regard to men’s avoidance of generosity: “Women use against themselves that benevolence / To which no man is friend” (emphasis mine). The one quality explicitly repudiated by men, benevolence is placed in critical focus as Bogan indicts cultural constriction that leads to women’s self-sacrifice. If employed against self-hood, such negative benevolence allows any “life” to enter, even that which should be rejected. Cultural expectations of women’s kindness are repudiated—kindnesses that women are discouraged from practicing toward themselves. Significantly, “Women” reveals maleness as exteriorized by a speaker who exaggerates oppositions between the sexes and finally renders women as the principal gender whose benevolence toward men is misplaced. “Women,” then, is a portrayal of men as an absence, continually exterior to women. Finally, men are expelled from the site of the poem, presumably as “life” itself that should be “let go . . . by.”

“Women,” I am arguing, is both a critique of women’s acculturated behavior and an implicit critique of men’s. Bogan excoriates existing orders between the sexes. In particular she exposes the psychological constriction of women and the psychological externalization of men in regard to women’s intimate concerns.

Bogan’s reliance on strategies of extraction and separation reflects legitimate conflict—and a strategy for psychological survival that she learned early in life. In recent years we have had much of Bogan’s private history opened to us through her vivid and revealing letters; Ruth Limmer’s remarkable “mosaic” of autobiographical material; and Elizabeth Frank’s carefully composed and insightful biography. Most readers are now aware of Bogan’s difficult childhood, including the specter of familial violence and her mother’s extramarital affairs and prolonged absences. Critics have reconstructed this life in ways that illuminate Bogan’s conflicts and, most particularly, Frank has memorably revealed Bogan’s embattled progression toward maturity. Bogan’s autobiographical accounts suggest that, with whatever difficulty, she separated herself from overwhelming and capricious others; separation became a means of survival and integrity. She separated herself from her family, from two husbands, and from low cultural expectations of women’s lyrics. Nevertheless, her life in some analyses becomes largely an exemplar of stern self-repression. In re-making the poet, her critics often focus on the hobbling nature of her childhood handicaps, neglecting the triumph of her audacious exploration of obsession.

We might consider in this context an early poem in which a woman must be extracted from a ruling conception—indeed, extracted in a way that must have been piercingly familiar to the young Bogan. In “The Romantic” a male figure would “name” a woman “chaste,” denying her physical desire, that trope in Bogan’s work for independence and life energy. Ascribing to a woman a purity that nullifies her experience, and attempting “to fix and name her,” the romantic proves adept only at illusion and denial. The woman eludes his ultimate plans and entirely escapes figuration in the present. At best, her past may be described (and surely someone will be glad to describe “what she was”) but neither her present nor her future may be narrated. Both resist interpretation:

In her obedient breast, all that ran free
You thought to bind, like echoes in a shell.
At the year’s end, you promised, it would be
The unstrung leaves, and not her heart, that fell.

So the year broke and vanished on the screen
You cast about her; summer went to haws.
This, by your leave, is what she should have been,—
Another man will tell you what she was.

No longer a victim, the woman has fled the romantic’s ideological constraints. A traditional romantic conception would limit the woman, and yet she is already an absence within the poem, for she refuses to be divorced from her own bodily experience. Through separation between the romantic and the object of his desire, Bogan reveals not only conflicts between the sexes but the absence of actual relationship.

In this context, mirroring, explored in a number of Bogan’s poems, proves significant. Without clear psychological boundaries we simply reflect others, and a crippling symbiosis occurs. “Portrait” presents a woman coming into poetic and emotional maturity, for she need not “be a glass, where to foresee / Another’s ravage.” No longer reflecting her lover’s desire, she is “possessed by time.” If the latter phrase suggests sudden mortality and erotic devaluation, in turn it initiates another possibility: the woman may now more fully experience the mutable world and her own presence within it. In “The Crows” a passionate older woman may “hear the crows’ cry” and gain knowledge. If the crows cry for aged and young, jeering “over what yields not, and what yields,” the mature woman may hear enough to suspect romantic fusion. In a later poem, “Man Alone,” a dominating sensibility is rendered exterior: a man who would only “read” his being through feminine presence must find himself continually estranged. For him, the feminine does not exist other than as a projection. As such the speaker remains a “stranger” to the narcissist who seeks his reflection through her:

The glass does not dissolve;
Like walls the mirrors stand;
The printed page gives back
Words by another hand.

And your infatuate eye
Meets not itself below:
Strangers lie in your arms
As I lie now.

Pointedly, the narcissist has no identity; the woman he seeks must effectively separate herself from him or she threatens to become, as myth would have it, his echo.

Within poems that are addressed most pointedly to women, stern lessons in perception are granted, one woman to another. Such lessons involve separation as a discipline that prompts new knowledge. As we have seen in “The Alchemist” separation proves a means of discovering the flesh—and, by extension—the feminine. In “Women” Bogan examines cultural law that renders men extraneous to women. In “The Romantic” she extracts the feminine from an overwhelming conception that denies the body. In “The Crossed Apple” she reveals suffering mandated within romantic love and refuses it for her speaker. The latter poem may prove particularly illuminating. Presumably an older woman (as women frequently bear apples in myth and fairy tale) presents a younger woman with a divided apple: a choice between peaceful nurturance, “Meadow Milk,” or the suffering of passionate love, “Sweet Burning”:

Oh, this is a good apple for a maid,
It is a cross,

Fine on the finer, so the flesh is tight,
And grained like silk.
Sweet Burning gave the red side, and the white
Is Meadow Milk.

Eat it; and you will taste more than the fruit;
The blossom, too,
The sun, the air, the dark at the root,
The rain, the dew,

The earth we came to, and the time we flee,
The fire and the breast,
I claim the white part, maiden, that’s for me.
You take the rest.

Dividing experience into extremes (“this side is red without a dapple, / And this side’s hue / Is clear and snowy”), the speaker’s offering contains, if the maiden will interpret her gift correctly, a lesson in self-interest. Whether a wizened Eve or a revisionary witch, the speaker refuses self-illusion; she divides as a means to clarify. The maiden must refuse extremes of experience or—if she prefers—she might follow the speaker’s example and “claim” the apple half that is “clear and snowy” for herself.

In later poems this poet dissolves urgent confrontation, investing her poetry with effects of ephemerality and translucence. One of her crossed gifts to readers may be a map of release. From enacting obsession she moves to the repudiation of obsession. The later poem “After the Persian” is especially interesting in this sense. Her speaker immediately opens with a quiet refusal, for any state of being that she has judged to be sterile and deceptive must be abjured. She rejects a “terrible jungle” of infertility and illusion precisely because she has already understood its nature. The jungle’s “sterile lianas” and “serpent’s disguise” signal self-betrayal:

I do not wish to know
the depths of your terrible jungle:
From what next your leopard leaps
Or what sterile lianas are at once your serpents’
disguise and home.

Bogan projects mature experience as that of dwelling, inhabiting a threshold of plenitude in which living beings are not hardened into facile artifice or static conception. In this paradisal landscape of the psyche, creatures are in continual flux. Through flashing, jewel-like lines, Bogan renders an uncategorizable state. Moving from the wilderness of the youthful quester to the garden of mature knowledge, the dweller has triumphed over fruitless obsession and needless sorrow:

Here the moths take flight at evening;
Here at morning the dove whistles and the pigeons coo.
Here, as night comes on, the fireflies wink and snap
Close to the cool ground,
Shining in a profusion
Celestial or marine.

Each of the poem’s five sections presents an engaged progression toward psychological release and an effect of discipline rather than escape. The first establishes a benevolent site; the second reviews the past; the third honors the “treasure” of the poem itself; the fourth contrasts present fulfillment with past suffering; and the fifth enacts departure and release. For Bogan, “the shimmer of evil” must be replaced by “the shell’s iridescence / And the wild bird’s wing.” As her fluctuating images thwart possessiveness, conflict is supplanted by release for a speaker who herself must progressively disappear from the poem:

Goodbye, goodbye!
There was so much to love, I could not love it all:
I could not love it enough.

Some things I overlooked, and some I could not find.
Let the crystal clasp them
When you drink your wine, in autumn.

Just as the treasure of experience rendered into poetry must prove “weightless,” so too the speaker must become a disembodied spirit freed of confines. The poem proves a paean to the possibility of securing an inner life that reflects peaceful selfnurturance by separating the self from oppressive and deceptive forces.

A spirit of criticism animates many of Bogan’s poems. We might recall that Bogan wrote meticulous and wide-ranging criticism, serving as poetry critic for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years. For some readers during her lifetime she was more widely known as a critic than as a poet. The fine lens of analytical discernment that she focused upon her contemporaries’ poetry clarified in turn the relationship that her poems explore. Externalizing an alien value structure rather that absorbing it. Bogan is not a comfortable figure, aggrandized easily into any critical view, including that of much recent criticism in which she too often emerges as either a repressed mandarin or a stricken victim. Questioning romantic illusion, symbiosis, and self-sacrifice in love, she presents a “crossed” gift to women: a poetry of profound criticism rather than simple affirmation.

Bogan remains a poet who will continue to be read—perhaps even more so as we come to recognize the ways that her poetry explores the unconscious dynamics of women’s experience. We may recall that in “The Crossed Apple” the action of the witch-like speaker—her claim to tranquility and her refusal to embrace the destructive experience of “Sweet Burning”—constitutes a lesson of sorts, a counter to the excesses of culture that define women as self-destructively benevolent. We might in turn recall Adrienne Rich’s observation that Bogan’s poetry proves “a graph of the struggle to commit a female sensibility, in all its aspects, to language.” Rich further observes, “We who inherit that struggle have much to learn from her.” Bogan’s poetry of separation offers an invigorating challenge to her readers. In the recent re-making of Louse Bogan this poet’s aesthetics too often remain obscured by critics who seek directness, unity, and affirmation. As a consequence, Bogan becomes our puzzling Athena of modern American poetry. But before casting her poetics as a “paradigm” of oppression and self-hate, we might do well to remember Bogan’s repudiation of suffering and the example that she dramatizes of positive self-concern:

I claim the white part, maiden, that’s for me.
You take the rest.

Source: Lee Upton, “The Re-Making of a Poet: Louise Bogan,” in Centennial Review, Vol. 36, No. 3, Fall 1992, pp. 557–72.

The critic Malcolm Cowley remarked in a review of Louise Bogan’s slim volume Poems and New Poems (1941) that she had “done something that has been achieved by very few of her contemporaries: she has added a dozen or more to our small stock of memorable lyrics. She has added nothing whatever to our inexhaustible store of trash.” Bogan’s reputation as a poet is secure on exactly that scale. She is remembered and studied as one of the finest lyric poets America has produced, though 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. Her achievement in poetry has also been overshadowed by her extensive critical writings; for thirty-eight years she was the poetry critic for The New Yorker magazine, the arbiter of taste in such matters for a literate and influential audience.

Louise Bogan was born of the unhappy marriage of Daniel and May Shields Bogan in Livermore Falls, Maine, a bustling mill town on the Androscoggin River. In 1897, the year of Louise’s birth, Daniel Bogan was superintendent in a pulp mill in the town, the first of many such relatively white-collar mill jobs he would hold during her childhood. Louise was their third child; a son, Charles, had been born in 1884, and a second son, Edward, had died in infancy. Bogan grew up in the Irish communities of deepest New England, moving often with her family to a variety of hotels and boardinghouses and other temporary dwellings: to Milton, New Hampshire, in 1901; to Ballardvale, Massachusetts, in 1904; to Roxbury, near Boston, in 1909. These moves were prompted both by economics and by the family’s unhappiness. May Shields Bogan was a beautiful and unstable woman prone to flaunting her many extramarital affairs (on at least one occasion witnessed by her daughter) and to mysterious and lengthy disappearances.

Despite these disruptions, Bogan was quite well educated, in a New Hampshire convent (1906– 1908) and at Boston’s excellent Girls’ Latin School (1910–1915), where she received a classical education in Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, history, science, and the arts. Having fallen under the poetic spell of A. C. Swinburne and the French Symbolists, she was a constant contributor to Latin’s literary magazine, The Jabberwock, until she was told by the headmaster to trim her ambitions: “No Irish girl could be editor of the school magazine.” Such prejudice was prevalent in Boston at the time, and Bogan never ceased to resent it. She transcended these limitations, however, and continued to publish her high school poems, including four in the Boston Evening Transcript, and was named class poet. She was a wide and constant reader who followed her own tastes and developed early and intense literary ambitions.

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. She would suffer for most of her life from serious depression, which resulted in three lengthy hospital stays for treatment. She would drink heavily, and her work would suffer from what Elizabeth Frank in Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1985) has called “a principle of arrest”: “Something stopped Louise Bogan dead in her tracks, not once, but many times.” But her fine early education would form the foundation of her poetry and criticism, as would, in some sense, her unhappiness.

Sent by her parents to Boston University in 1916, Bogan did extremely well and earned a scholarship to Radcliffe for her sophomore year. She turned it down, however, for the chance to leave home in the company of a husband, Curt Alexander, a soldier of German origin nine years her senior. She moved with her husband to New York City, and then, when war was declared in 1917, to Panama, where she gave birth to their daughter, Mathilde (Maidie) Alexander. Miserable in the role of military wife and in the heat and humidity of Panama, Bogan wrote poems about her condition, including “Betrothed” (which appeared in her first collection) and “The Young Wife” (which she never collected) and schemed to get back to New England. She left Panama with her child in May 1918 and moved in with her parents in Massachusetts. At the end of the war she was briefly reconciled with her husband, and they lived for a time on army bases near Portland, Maine, and near Hoboken, New Jersey. In the summer of 1919 she left Alexander for good, delivering her daughter to her parents and finding herself an apartment in New York from which to launch her career as a woman of letters. Alexander died in 1920, and his army widow’s pension enabled Bogan to stay in the city.

From her temporary job at Brentano’s bookstore in New York, Bogan quickly became involved in the city’s active literary community. Her earliest friendships included Lola Ridge, Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Maxwell Bodenheim, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Conrad Aiken, and, most important, Edmund Wilson. At the fringes of, but deeply skeptical about, the leftist politics common in the group, Bogan nonetheless found herself in an intense love affair with a young radical named John Coffey, who would shoplift (his speciality was furs) and then plead the cause of the poor in his courtroom appearances. Bogan drove the getaway car on one of these escapades, a fact that embarrassed her from time to time for the rest of her life. When Coffey finally succeeded in making his motives clear to a judge, he was committed to a hospital for the insane.

Bogan set about educating herself and honing her writing skills with great seriousness and dedication. Ever conscious of her educational deficiencies (she carried a lifelong resentment toward people with advanced degrees), she sought to make up for them by reading. In this period she discovered the poetry of William Butler Yeats, who, like Rainer Maria Rilke and W. H. Auden later, would become a poetic touchstone and an important influence on her work. Bogan’s poems appeared in the best journals of her day, almost from the beginning of her stay in New York. She published often in Harriet Monroe’s influential Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and was involved from the start with The Measure, a “little magazine” devoted to the formal lyric. She became acquainted with the work of the most important female poets of the day, including Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as the poetry of Edward Arlington Robinson, perhaps her most direct American influence. Also through her work on The Measure (and a brief stint as a card filer in the office of the anthropologist William Fielding Ogburn) she met and became friendly with Margaret Mead and the poet Léonie Adams. In 1922 Bogan spent six months alone in Vienna, absorbing European culture and writing, and by the fall of 1923 she had secured a publisher, Robert M. McBride, for her first book of poems.

Body of This Death (1923) contains several of Bogan’s most memorable poems and in general reveals its author’s preoccupations and tastes. Betrayal, particularly sexual betrayal, is a constant theme, though the poems are in no way “confessional.” In private writing included in Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan (1980), Bogan echoes Emerson’s charge that the poet tell his life story in “cipher”: “The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself. The repressed becomes the poem. Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there.”

Like Emily Dickinson’s “gift of screws,” Bogan’s poems are made of meticulously distilled experience, distanced from the source by objective language. Often presented by their titles as songs or chants or arias, her poems call attention to themselves as rhetorical acts in a common language. Such commitment to public discourse did not protect Bogan from occasional obscurity—the distillation sometimes reduced emotion to indecipherable symbolism. But Bogan saw herself in the tradition of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English lyric poetry, and she disciplined her poetic emotion to the formal rhyme and meter she instinctively preferred. Her well-known poem “The Alchemist” speaks to the method:

I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.

The poem’s concluding second stanza admits the necessity of “unmysterious flesh” after all.

Several of the poems in Body of This Death address specifically female concerns and point to Bogan’s ambivalent relationship with the tradition of female lyric poets. 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 for the dry pronouncements of her much-anthologized lyric “Women”: “Women have no wilderness in them, / They are provident instead, / Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts / To eat dusty bread.” Missing the ironic self-criticism in the poem (“As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills / They should let it go by”), feminist critics have read it as general condemnation of women and their ways of viewing experience. While the situation of women in Bogan’s poems is rarely preferred to the situation of men, she is capable of wise and penetrating insight. “Betrothed,” “Portrait,” “My Voice Not Being Proud,” “Medusa,” “The Crows,” “The Changed Woman,” “Chanson Un Peu Naïve,” and “Fifteenth Farewell” are all strong poems with female speakers or subjects. She saw herself and her work as arising from that definite tradition of female lyricists, represented in the generation just older than Bogan herself by the strong figures of Sara Teasdale, Millay, and Wylie. For Marianne Moore and Hilda Doolittle, the more typically modernist women poets of the period, she felt less affinity.

Early in 1924 Bogan’s close friend Edmund Wilson suggested that she try her hand at criticism. That spring she published her first book review, of D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), in The New Republic. She would continue to write poetry reviews for the rest of her life, and as poems came to her less and less frequently as she grew older, Bogan became better known as a critic than as a poet. In 1931 she wrote her first review for The New Yorker, and twice a year until 1969 she presented the season’s new poetry books to that magazine’s discriminating audience while also continuing to write for The New Republic and the Nation.

Bogan’s predilections in her criticism are similar to those in her poems: she showed a marked preference for crafted eloquence over free-verse expansiveness; she directed her readers away from contemporary fashions and toward what she called in the February 1925 issue of The Measure “the heft and swing of English poetry in the tradition”; and she would tolerate no slackness in thought or expression. She thought of herself as educating her audiences and shared with them the enthusiasms of her own reading, particularly William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W. H. Auden. She was critical when she saw the need to be, regardless of her relationship to the writer, and she lost friends in the process. In 1932 she reviewed her friend Allen Tate so harshly that he wrote to protest. Her reply, in a private letter dated 1 April, defended her objective view: “I was reviewing a book of poetry which aroused in me respect and irritation in about equal measure. If you objected to the tone of my review, I objected, straight down to a core beyond detachment, to the tone of some of the poems.”

In 1925 Bogan married Raymond Holden, a sometime poet and novelist who had been a friend of Robert Frost. She retrieved her daughter from her parents and moved with Holden to Boston. Although Holden came from a wealthy family, he was in financial straits by the time he married Bogan. From the start their marriage suffered from economic strain, but for a time the relationship was relatively happy. They moved in a social and literary circle that included Rolfe Humphries and Adams, both of whom would be lifelong friends to Bogan. In 1926 they moved back to New York but spent the winter in Sante Fe, New Mexico, for Holden’s health. In 1928 they bought a farmhouse in Hillsdale, New York, and amid the chaos of renovations Bogan found a measure of happiness and new poems. But in December 1929 the house burned to the ground (including almost all of Bogan’s books, letters, and manuscripts). While the insurance money enabled the couple to set up a new life in New York, the happiest period in Bogan’s life had clearly come to an end.

Dark Summer (1929), her second volume of poetry, marks Bogan’s first work with her most helpful editor, John Hall Wheelock of Scribners. In what would become a pattern in Bogan’s publishing life, the volume includes a selection of poems from Body of This Death as well as new work, which included the only two long poems she ever published: “The Flume,” an autobiographical narrative based on the many waterways of her mill-town childhood (which she never again included in a collection); and “Summer Wish,” a moving argument between two voices concerning the possibility of spring’s renewal and the necessity for acceptance in fall. “Summer Wish” reflects the contemplative happiness of Bogan’s stay in the house in Hillsdale and as such was almost anachronistic by the time it saw print.

The shorter lyrics of Dark Summer again show Bogan’s mastery of observation, diction, meter, and rhyme in poems that generally emphasize acceptance and fulfillment rather than the disappointment and betrayal of her earlier work. “Cassandra” captures the mythical figure’s sorrowing mood: “To me, one silly task is like another. / I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride. / This flesh will never give a child its mother.” “Winter Swan” and “The Cupola” show the poet’s descriptive powers, reminiscent of those of Moore. Other poems such as “The Crossed Apple” recall the language and tone of Robert Frost:

This apple’s from a tree yet unbeholden,
Where two kinds meet,—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Eat it; and you will taste more than the fruit:
The blossom, too,
The sun, the air, the darkness at the root,
The rain, the dew,
The earth we came to, and the time we flee,
The fire and the breast.
I claim the white part, maiden, that’s for me.
You take the rest.

The seasons and the passage of time are the subject of several of the strongest lyrics in the book, including “Division,” “Girl’s Song,” “Feuer-Nacht,” “Fiend’s Weather,” and “Come, Break with Time.” The lovely first stanza of “Simple Autumnal” illustrates Bogan’s preoccupation:

The measured blood beats out the year’s delay.
The tearless eyes and heart, forbidden grief,
Watch the burned, restless, but abiding leaf,
The brighter branches arming the bright day.

In the year following the publication of Dark Summer, the marriage between Bogan and Holden began to fail, and Bogan fell ill with severe depression. In the spring of 1931 she checked herself into New York’s Neurological Institute in hopes of finding a cure. “I refused to fall apart,” she wrote to Wheelock, “so I have been taken apart, like a watch.” In the mood of self-reflection following her release from the hospital, she wrote the autobiographical essay “Journey Around My Room,” which would become the basis of the “autobiography” edited by her friend Ruth Limmer in 1980.

In 1932 Bogan was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship “for creative writing abroad” and set sail alone for Italy in April 1933. While she was away in Italy, France, and Austria, struggling to write and often depressed, her marriage fell apart completely. When she returned home several months early to remake her life, the enterprise was not immediately successful. In November 1933 she checked herself into New York Hospital’s Westchester Division, this time admitting a “bad nervous crack-up.”

She stayed at the hospital for nearly seven months and returned home a good deal healthier than when she had left. She divorced her husband, gathered her good friends—Edmund Wilson and Morton Dauwen Zabel in particular—around, and set about to do her work. Though she was able to write only a few poems, she took up her critical prose with enthusiasm and began to write short stories and autobiographical prose, which she hoped to make into a novel tentatively titled “Laura Dailey’s Story.” An excellent prose stylist and storyteller, Bogan eventually published thirteen stories in The New Yorker, but she did not complete her novel. She gave up writing both fiction and autobiography after 1936.

The years between 1935 and 1941 or so were some of the most fulfilling in Bogan’s life, despite financial troubles (she was evicted from her apartment in September 1935 and had to retrieve her possessions from the street). She continued to write critical prose and began to prepare her third book of poems, The Sleeping Fury (1937). In June 1935 she began a happy love affair with the young poet Theodore Roethke, a dozen years her junior. She wrote to Wilson of her enthusiasm:

I, myself, have been made to bloom like a Persian rose-bush, by the enormous love-making of a cross between a Brandenburger and a Pomeranian, one Theodore Roethke by name. He is very, very large (6 ft. 2 and weighing 218 lbs) and he writes very very small lyrics. 26 years old and a frightful tank. We have poured rivers of liquor down our throats, these last three days, and, in between, have indulged in such bearish and St. Bernardish antics as I have never before experienced. . . . Well! Such goings on! A woman of my age! The affair lasted several months, and the two remained friends. Bogan had much to teach Roethke about lyric poetry, and she quickly assumed that role in his life. Several poems came to Bogan during this relationship, perhaps the last such spell of extended creativity she would experience. The new poems enabled her to publish The Sleeping Fury, which was then generally regarded as her strongest volume.

The lyrics of The Sleeping Fury reflect the hard-won wisdom of Bogan’s psychological recovery as well as her renewed health and vitality. Its reviewers remarked the collection’s “sparseness” but praised its integrity. Her friend Zabel noted in the 5 May 1937 New Republic the book’s freedom from the fashionable ideologies of the day and defended its “old fashioned” values:

It is because they show so firmly what this depth can yield that these poems bring the finest vitality of the lyric tradition to bear on the confusions that threaten the poets who, by satire or prophecy, indignation or reform, have reacted against that tradition and cast it into contempt. . . . Her work, instinctive with selfcriticism and emotional severity, speaks with one voice only; her rewards and those of her readers have a common source in the discipline to which the clarity of her music and her unsophistic craftsmanship are a testimony. It should be a model for poets in any decade or of any ambition.

The book opens and closes with “songs” and in between contains a handful of Bogan’s finest lyrics. The opening of “Roman Fountain” reflects her memories of Italy and, perhaps, some of the sexual vitality of her affair with Roethke:

Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest,
and fall.
Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

Several poems offer advice to an imagined reader who has suffered what Bogan has. “Henceforth, from the Mind” counsels acceptance of the diminished emotional intensity of a healthy adult life. “Exhortation” repudiates that resolution through painful irony: “Give over seeking bastard joy / Nor cast for fortune’s side-long look. / Indifference can be your toy; / The bitter heart can be your book.”

In her title poem, “The Sleeping Fury,” Bogan looks mental torment in the face:

Your hair fallen on your cheek, no longer in the
semblance of serpents,
Lifted in the gale; your mouth, that shrieked so,
silent.
You, my scourge, my sister, lie asleep, like a child,
Who, after rage, for an hour quiet, sleeps out its tears
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And now I may look upon you,
Having once met your eyes. You lie in sleep and
forget
me.
Alone and strong in my peace, I look upon you in yours.

“Kept” shows a mature denial of sentimentalized memories of childhood and youth:

Time for the wood, the clay,
The trumpery dolls, the toys
Now to be put away:
We are not girls and boys
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Time for the pretty clay,
Time for the straw, the wood.
The playthings of the young
Get broken in the play,
Get broken, as they should.

Bogan also looks hard at alcohol, the friend and sometime nemesis of her life. In “To Wine” she ironically exhorts the “Cup, ignorant and cruel,” to

Take from the mind its loss:
The lipless dead that lie
Face upward in the earth,
Strong hand and slender thigh;
Return to the vein
All that is worth
Grief. Give that beat again.

In 1937 Bogan applied for and was granted the remainder of her Guggenheim Fellowship, which she had been unable to complete in 1932. In April she sailed for Ireland. From the start the trip was a struggle for Bogan, who was frequently depressed and anxious. In the country of her ancestors she was unable for find a place for herself, and she sailed home several weeks later in a state of near collapse. A man on the boat train to Southampton came to her rescue and cared for her throughout the voyage home. After a week of recovery Bogan, who had remarked in her notebook three years before that “There can be no new love at 37, in a woman,” began a relationship with the man, an electrician from the Bronx, that would last eight years. She kept it largely a secret from her friends, but by her own account the relationship was as happy and fulfilling as any she would ever have.

In the spring of 1938 Bogan moved into the apartment on West 169th Street where she would live for the rest of her life, engaging in a lively and energetic career as a literary critic and a woman of letters, squabbling with her fellow poets and critics, and publishing many incisive and insightful reviews and essays. She championed the cause of W. H. Auden as he arrived in the United States in 1939 and did a great deal in bringing public attention to his work. But poems came to her only occasionally. She struggled to produce enough work for a new book, and Poems and New Poems included old work as well as what Bogan called her “light verse,” clever occasional poems on contemporary topics. In this category is the memorable couplet titled “Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell”: “At midnight tears / Run into your ears.”

The group of new poems in the volume opens with “Several Voices Out of a Cloud,” a sharp attack on the ideological hacks Bogan saw dominating the world of poetry. The poem is uncharacteristically contemporary, in a manner reminiscent of Auden: “Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!” she invites and concludes by naming the pretending poets:

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners
true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is
deathless
And it isn’t for you.

Other new poems have a variety of subjects: “Animal, Vegetable and Mineral” is a contemplation of the glass flowers exhibit at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History; “To Be Sung on the Water” is a tender and playful love lyric; and “Zone” captures with icy accuracy the disquieting ambiguity of New England in the month of March: “Now we hear / What we heard last year, / And bear the wind’s rude touch / And its ugly sound / Equally with so much / We have learned how to bear.”

Bogan wrote no poems between the publication of Poems and New Poems in 1941 and 1948. The horror of World War II discouraged her about the power of poetry against such hatred, and she was troubled by what she saw as the obscurity of her own position. In hopes of finding a publisher that would promote her work more forcefully, Bogan left Scribners and Wheelock, with unfortunate results. She would not find a new publisher until 1954, and the sense of being on her own made writing poems more difficult. She once remarked to Wheelock that “A woman writes poetry with her ovaries.” As she entered middle age Bogan began to feel that her time had past.

Bogan’s essays and reviews did much to keep her name before the public in the war years and their wake. She began new, lasting friendships among young admirers of her work, including William Maxwell, a novelist and New Yorker staffer when he met Bogan in 1938; May Sarton, an established poet whom Bogan invited to her apartment in 1953; and Ruth Limmer, an English professor whom Bogan met in 1956 when she received an honorary doctorate from the Western College for Women (Limmer would become her literary executor). With the winding down of the war, literature could once again command attention, and Bogan began to be asked to serve on various poetry-prize juries. In 1944 she gave the Hopwood lecture at the University of Michigan. She also began to read her poems in public and accepted the position as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1945–1946). She was in the Library Fellows group that, amid controversy, awarded the first Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound, then incarcerated in a mental institution in Washington, D.C., having been judged incompetent to stand trial for treason at the end of the war. She accepted a teaching position at the University of Washington and went on to teach at the University of Chicago and New York University, among other places. Bogan also began her work as a translator, working with Elizabeth Mayer on works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ernst Juenger and with Elizabeth Roget on works by Jules Renard. In 1951 she published her critical study, Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950, which included an anthology with her selection of worthy poems from the period.

Bogan found a publisher in the new Noonday Press in the early 1950s and set about preparing her Collected Poems 1923–1953 (1954). She had only three new poems to add to the whole: “After the Persian,” her contemplation of Persian art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum; the light poem “Train Tune”; and, most remarkably, “Song for the Last Act.” This poem is built around a refrain, varied to marvelous effect in each of its three stanzas: “Now that I have your face by heart, I look”; “Now that I have your voice by heart, I read”; “Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.” The poem links desire and memory in a tone unmistakably valedictory, “O not departure, but a voyage done!” A year later Bogan published a volume of Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry (1955). Both volumes were respectfully reviewed, and she shared the 1955 Bollingen Prize with Léonie Adams.

Bogan’s last years were a combination of honors, continued hard work, dark depression, and alcoholism. Between 1957 and 1964 she went annually to the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where she found the time and peace to write poems as well as critical prose. Her collection The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968 (1968) includes a dozen new poems, most of which had been begun much earlier. Most of her last poems are in free verse, as Bogan grew more willing to accept poems in the forms in which they came to her. Notable among these last works is “The Dragonfly,” written on commission from the Corning Glass Company, which had a Steuben glass dragonfly carved to illustrate it. The poem “Night” provided the title for the collection. It recalls in both setting and sound poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Bogan’s somewhat younger contemporary:

The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.

The Blue Estuaries received strong reviews. William Meredith in the 13 October 1968 New York Times Book Review called Bogan “one of the best woman poets alive” and wondered at how her “reputation has lagged behind a career of stubborn, individual excellence.” Hayden Carruth in the August 1969 issue of Poetry praised the poems despite their small number: “this book’s best pages make it fundamentally irreducible.” That assessment seems accurate; perhaps the forces or frailties that prevented Bogan from writing more afforded her marvelous control over her art.

Louise Bogan died at her apartment of a coronary occlusion on 4 February 1970. A memorial service, arranged by her friend William Jay Smith, was held at the Academy of Arts and Letters on 11 March, attended by 120 of her friends and admirers. At the service W. H. Auden noted Bogan’s personal strength. “Aside from their technical excellence,” he said of her poems, “what is most impressive . . . is the unflinching courage with which she faced her problems, and her determination never to surrender to self-pity, but to wrest beauty and joy out of dark places.”

Source: Brett C. Millier, “Louise Bogan,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 169, American Poets Since World War II, Fifth Series, edited by Joseph Conte, Gale, 1996, pp. 54–62.

In 1970, at a memorial service for Louise Bogan, W.H. Auden identified what he thought to be the most enduring qualities of her lyric poetry: “aside from their technical excellence, [what] is most impressive about her poems is the unflinching courage with which she faced her problems, and her determination never to surrender to self-pity, but to wrest beauty and joy out of dark places.” Auden had first met Bogan in 1941 when she was well established as a critic of poetry at the New Yorker and had already written four of the six books of verse on which her reputation as one of America’s finest lyric poets was to rest. For almost thirty years, he had watched the unfolding of a talent. His appreciation of her gifts as poet, essayist, fiction writer, and autobiographer was shared by many of Bogan’s friends, who also saw the violence of feeling which her work expressed and subdued through the regularities of form. Classical in their adherence to the laws of traditional poetic structure, romantic in their tendency to embrace the extremes of passionate experience, her best lyrics can stand with the work of the poets she most admired: Yeats, Rilke, and Auden. As Theodore Roethke had earlier written in honor of his friend, teacher, and mentor, “The best work will stay in the language as long as the language survives.”

Bogan’s journey to a place of prominence in American letters had been wrested from unpromising beginnings. Born on 11 August 1897, the daughter of Daniel Bogan, a clerk in a paper mill in Livermore Falls, Maine, and Mary Helen Murphy Shields Bogan, she was more properly destined for married life in the mill towns of New England. Her mother was a reckless, violent, and undependable woman who handled the disappointments of her marriage through numerous love affairs. The Bogan children, Louise and her brother, Charles, were raised in a succession of rooming houses and exposed to an equally consistent succession of their mother’s lovers. These childhood circumstances would never leave Bogan’s memory, and they account for one of the predominant emotional constellations in both her life and art: the belief that love was inextricably bound with rage, guilt, and betrayal. By the age of six or eight she had become “what I was for half my life: the semblance of a girl, in which some desires and illusions had been early assassinated: shot dead.”

If her parents served as the source of Bogan’s early grief, they also provided her, indirectly, with the resources for coping with that sorrow. Eventually Daniel Bogan moved his family to Boston. where Louise was given piano lessons and then sent to Girls’ Latin School. She was trained in Greek and Latin, and in the classical structures of versification. These few years were almost the whole of her formal education. Although she wrote constantly (by the age of eighteen, she “had a thick pile of manuscripts in a drawer in the dining room”), she chose not to pursue a full college career. After one year at Boston University (1915–1916), she abandoned plans to go on to Radcliffe in favor of marriage, on 4 September 1916, to a young soldier of German origin, Curt Alexander. In part she married as an escape from the domestic traumas of her parents’ household, but she proved to be more of her mother’s child than she could comfortably admit; for in later years, she reenacted the cycle of lust and betrayal that she so regretted in her parent. It was as if she were drawn to recapitulate her position as a helpless, violated child until, with the help of psychoanalysis, she broke through the cycle of damage to a superior awareness.

Nowhere does her poetry discuss these painful experiences; nonetheless they underlie and explain the dynamics of many of her early lyrics. Later in life, she was able to formulate a theory about the relationship between poetry and the experiences in life which empower it: in Journey Around My Room (1980) she said, “The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself. The repressed becomes the poem. Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there.” Yet initially, in her poetry and in her life, she sought passion for its own sake and was dismayed when it offered her so little that she wanted.

On 19 October 1917 Mathilde (Maidie), her only child, was born; several months later, two of her first poems were published in Others, a little magazine edited by Alfred Kreymborg in New York City. By May 1918 she had left Alexander at his station in Panama and returned to the home of her parents. This, too, was a temporary move, a prelude to a life of uncommon transience in which moving represented or expressed an underlying restlessness of spirit. Years later, her emotions governed by a hard-won and mature perspective, she wondered if she had eradicated the deepest sources of her own creativity in the course of mastering her otherwise self-destructive conflicts. To Morton Zabel she wrote in December 1935, “I don’t recommend to you, this calm I have reached. It may be spiritual death or spiritual narcosis.” But in the midst of young adulthood, she did not pause to analyze. She was pulled toward New York City, where she hoped to find a context for herself among the bohemians of Greenwich Village.

New York in 1919 did, in fact, nurture her talent and provide her with the friends who remained closest to her in later life: William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Maxwell Bodenheim, Edmund Wilson, Léonie Adams, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Rolf Humphries were among her earliest acquaintances. Leaving Maidie with her parents, she found a lover; she worked and wrote. In 1920 she learned of Curt Alexander’s death. Whatever remorse she may have felt about their broken relationship and the temporary abandonment of their child was seasoned with the rewards of poetic achievement. By 1921 Harriet Weaver had published five of her poems in Poetry; by 1923 Bogan had found a publisher for her first book of verse. Robert M. McBride and Company brought out Body of This Death.

The title of the book is taken from Rom. 7:24: “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Its themes are those that would absorb her for her entire career: the betrayal of beauty by the flesh, the antipathy between passion and wisdom, the tension between time and the “crystal clasp” of art. Strongly influenced by Yeats, Bogan found highly personal and deeply feminine ways to express the yearning for transcendence which must succumb to the limitations of time and human error. “Knowledge” can stand as an example of themes whose variations are worked out by “A Tale,” “Medusa,” “A Letter,” “Sonnet,” and the other poems of this collection: “Now that I know / Now passion warms little / Of flesh in the mould, / And treasure is brittle,—I’ll lie here and learn / How, over their ground, / Trees make a long shadow / And a light sound.”

When Robert Frost read “A Tale,” the opening poem of Body of This Death , he remarked, “That woman will be able to do anything.” Other critics shared his appreciation of Bogan’s technical mastery and commented on the intensity, fierceness, and pride which seemed to motivate the writing. But not everyone was as discerning or generous. Often reviewers were puzzled, finding the language “only obscurely significant” (Dial). The worst review came from John Gould Fletcher, who considered the book to have “an emptiness of thought that is positively painful” (Freeman).

Bogan took what she could from both praise and blame. Her allegiance to the life of letters was too deeply ingrained to let adverse reactions discourage her. Among those whose opinions she valued, the book’s publication established her as a serious new talent. She would continue to write and to grow closer to Wilson and Humphries and the small group of writers who published in the Measure the New Republic, and the Nation.

In 1924 she met Raymond Peckham Holden, the son of a wealthy New York family, a man who aspired to the life of poet and novelist, and who later became the managing editor of the New Yorker. On 10 July 1925 they were married; and after living briefly in Boston, New York, and Santa Fe, they bought a farmhouse in Hillsdale, New York. This house became for Bogan the place of harmony and abundance which her own childhood had denied her. Here she cooked, gardened, raised her child, and learned to see the patterns of nature which life in the city had rendered obscure. Here, too, she wrote most of the lyrics for Dark Summer (1929), sending them, finally, to Edmund Wilson for criticism and advice about publication.

By recommending that she forward a copy of Body of This Death to Charles Scribner’s Sons, Wilson initiated the strongest and most enduring publishing relationship of Bogan’s career. Maxwell Perkins was favorably impressed with her work and John Hall Wheelock even more so. He offered Bogan a contract, asked for more work, and eventually published her next three volumes of poetry.

With these prospects before her, Bogan settled into one of the still, certain interludes of her life. Domestic order mirrored a psychic order that was all too rare in her experience of intimate relationships. It was precisely the fragility of this balanced, pastoral life that made its subsequent destruction so grim. After Christmas 1929, the Holdens returned to Hillsdale only to see their house on fire, manuscripts and notebooks—indeed all their possessions—destroyed in the blaze. Posed as she was between desire and rage, Bogan could not help but read the fire emblematically; and in fact, the equanimity of her marriage seems to have dissipated along with her more tangible belongings. Although Dark Summer had come out the previous September, the pleasure of its publication could not offset another kind of interior disintegration.

The middle period of Bogan’s creative life is marked by a dichotomy between the increasing solidity of her reputation as a poet and the seeming vulnerability of her emotions. Even as she received the accolades of critics, she lapsed into a deepening depression. In public life, Yvor Winters reviewed Dark Summer, singling out “Come, Break with Time” and “Simple Autumnal” for special praise. They could, he said, stand “with the best songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whether one selects examples from Campion, Jonson, or Dryden.” From a much later vantage point, Elizabeth Frank named “Simple Autumnal” “one of the great lyrics in American poetry.” She saw it as the effort of a writer to ally herself with the seasonal cycles of ripening and decay that Bogan’s earlier poetry had tried to escape. Like Hart Crane’s “Voyages,” it is a song of reconciliation and acceptance, which moves toward integration of the personal and natural worlds. “Summer Wish” is even more accomplished and brings Bogan’s work into the company of Yeats’s “The Tower” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” It is a meditative eclogue, a dialogue in which two voices confront the problem of despair.Although the second voice overwhelms the first, offering it a vision of stasis (“See now / Open above the field, stilled in wingstiffened flight, / The stretched hawk fly”), Bogan, in private life, was less and less able to find those quiet moments.

In April 1931 she submitted herself for a rest cure at the Neurological Institute in Manhattan. Once again, her private struggle was carried on amid an otherwise flourishing career. In 1933 when she was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation grant for travel in Europe, Bogan seized the opportunity, for she sensed that distance and change would grant her a perspective valuable both to her craft and to her domestic situation. In the first goal, she succeeded, but her marital problems were not so easily resolved. Very shortly after she returned from Europe, she once again admitted herself to a hospital for rest and personal reflection. By 1935, when she divorced Raymond Holden, the period of greatest turbulence in Bogan’s life was over.

It is probably not fortuitous that the 1930s were also the time of Bogan’s greatest achievements in prose writing. The self-reflection required by psychoanalysis may have spurred her autobiographical trilogy: “Journey Around My Room” (New Yorker, 1932), “Dove and Serpent” (New Yorker, 1933), and “Letdown” (New Yorker, 1934). All of these pieces constitute Bogan’s inquiry into those steps that “started me toward this point, as opposed to all other points on the habitable globe.” Her New Yorker stories, influenced by Viola Meynell, Ivan Turgenev, and Anton Chekhov, often seemed to work through the issues that were most pressing in her actual experience—the destructiveness of romantic attachment, the need for private sources of strength and grace.

This belief in the value of turning inward can also explain Bogan’s resistance to the social movements of the 1930s. She placed her faith in the lessons of psychoanalysis and in individual responses to fate; she gave no credence to solutions posed in terms of collective destiny. If one were “to lift the material world to the ideal,” she said (New Republic, 1936), “it would be just as well to clear up the ideal, to know the human springs that feed it.” Freud, with his discovery of the unconscious, was more important to her than Marx, with his belief in economic determinism; and as the 1930s passed, and as more and more of her intimate friends—Rolf Humphries, Léonie Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edmund Wilson—came to sympathize with the Communist cause, Bogan found herself increasingly isolated.

To Rolf Humphries and Edmund Wilson she proposed a political truce, since she needed their help in preparing her next book of poems. The Sleeping Fury, once again published by Scribners, appeared in 1937. The title of the book is also the name of a relief sculpture Bogan had seen in Rome at the Museo Nazionale delle Terme, “L’Erinni Addormentata”; and to some extent, this image of rage and grief, exhausted and given over to sleep, informs the entire collection of poems. Where Bogan’s first two books had shown the influence of Yeats, The Sleeping Fury showed most clearly the influence of Rilke, whom she had been reading avidly for several years. When she had needed a language for anger, indignation, and bitter disappointment, Yeats’s high blown rhetoric had been an adequate guide; now that she sought to transcend suffering and to express emotional equanimity, the German poet served her better. The most beautiful lyrics in this collection, “Henceforth from the Mind,” “The Sleeping Fury,” and “Song for a Lyre,” have the quiet authority of a poet in full command of her art.

The Sleeping Fury was essentially Bogan’s last full book of original verse; the books that followed it were collections of previously published works with new poems added to them. Poems and New Poems, which came out in 1941, was the last book Bogan published with Scribners before her break with John Hall Wheelock. Collected Poems, 1923–1953 was brought out by Cecil Hemley of Noonday Press in 1954. The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968 which Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published in 1968, served as a summary of her poetic achievement as it stretched from youth to age.

Although the years after 1937 were years of declining productivity, they were years when Bogan consolidated her reputation and reaped the fruits of an earlier devotion to letters. Others were anxious to know her opinions. If it was as a poet that Bogan made her reputation, it was as a critic that she made her living. Her work for the New Yorker continued until shortly before her death. Twice a year she provided the magazine with omnibus reviews of the most interesting poetry of the previous months, and she wrote countless brief notices. On her resignation from the magazine in 1969, William Shawn, then editor in chief, wrote, “for thirty-eight years we have been in the extraordinary position of knowing beyond all question that no other magazine’s reviewing of poetry was as perceptive or trustworthy or intelligent as our own.”

Awards and requests for readings, talks, and teaching posts started coming in the 1940s. In 1944 she became a Fellow in American Letters at the Library of Congress; in the same year, she gave the Hopwood Lecture at the University of Michigan. In 1945 she went to Washington, D.C., as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. The year 1948 was filled with invitations to universities, and though she remained acutely aware of her own lack of formal education and convinced that the academy had slighted her, a catalogue of her activities in this one year alone belies her own assessment: she went to a poetry conference at Sarah Lawrence College, gave a reading at the New School for Social Research with Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, and Allen Tate, taught summer school at the University of Washington, and spoke at Bard “On the Pleasures of Formal Verse.”

In 1951 she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1954 she was elected to the Academy of American Poets. In 1955 she shared the Bollingen Prize for poetry with Léonie Adams. In 1957 she was invited to the MacDowell Colony, and in the following year she participated in the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. An award from the Academy of American Poets came in 1959, and she received the Creative Arts award from Brandeis University in 1962. In 1969, a year before her death, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. On the more personal level, she had sustained the lifelong friendships of people she respected and had found room, at an age when other lives are often narrowing in scope, to admit new intimacies: William Maxwell, the new poetry editor for the New Yorker; Elizabeth Mayer, a German translator; and May Sarton, a younger writer and poet, are several examples.

Bogan’s final years were lived in a kind of secular monasticism. Weaned from the destructive passions that had governed her youth, she lived alone and with the dignity of a hard-won victory over private terrors. To her lifelong friend, Morton Zabel, she wrote, “It is as though I had, after thirty years, really come into my whole being. . . . I can feel rage, but I am never humiliated, any more, and I am never lonely.” Despite her brave words, her struggle was never simple and success never to be assumed. She could relapse into depressions until the end of her life. But she had, on the whole, found admission to the “temperate threshold” so avidly sought in and through her verse.

Poetry, to Bogan, was wrought from “rhythm as we first experience it . . . within the heartbeat, pulse and breath.” Certainly, in her own case, it was an extension of self so vital that its excision would have left her vulnerable to inner demons and, as Stanley Kunitz put it, to “the deep night swarming with images of reproach and desire.” But language did not fail her nor she it; and in her devotion to poetry she found forgiveness and personal reconciliation. To others she gave some of the most austere, searing, and beautiful lyrics written in America in this century.

Louise Bogan died on Wednesday, 4 February 1970. At her memorial service, Richard Wilbur, who spoke along with Auden, observed that “she remained faithful to the theme of passion.” William Meredith, writing during her lifetime, was more encompassing in his praise: Louise Bogan was “one of the best women poets alive.”

Source: Carol Shloss, “Louise Bogan,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 45, American Poets, 1880–1945, First Series, edited by Peter Quartermain, Gale, 1986, pp. 52–59.