“Hearts were forming in the lettuces of his vegetable beds”
---------William Trevor

Louise Bogan continued

Her next three books were all to be published in the form of Selected/Collected volumes, starting in with Poems and New Poems (Scribner's) in 1941 and Collected Poems (Noonday Press) in 1954, and lastly The Blue Estuaries, Poems 1923-1968 (Knopf). The all have selections from the first three volumes and respectively 16, 5 and 12 new poems. The last has a total of 103 poems so there are no doubt no more than 150-60 poems published in total. Perhaps there are unpublished poems in her archives at Amherst. Her poetry grows in sureness, calmness, clarity, acceptance and authenticity as she goes along. In many ways it also grows in simplicity. Some of the apt words used for her verse by others include: exquisite (by just about everybody, but not quite right I think), concentrated, Elizabethan, Metaphysical, difficult, obscure, sincere, austere, formal and reticent (this last I think is most appropriate). Generally a serious and even tragic poet, Bogan often shows an inventive comic streak as in “Several Voices Out of a Cloud.” Here it is in whole:

" Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom and
wherever deserved.

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. "

or earlier, from “Last Hill in a Vista:”

"Come, let us tell the weeds in ditches
How we are poor, who once had riches
And lie out in the sparse and sodden
Pastures that cows have trodden."


Among her late poems, we also find some of her most effective, graceful and moving poems, including “Baroque Comment,” “Evening in the Sanitarium,” “After the Persian,” “Song for the Last Act,” “The Dragonfly,” and “Night.”

Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, August 11, 1897 and died in New York City on February 4, 1970. She was married twice, to Curt Alexander from 1916-1920 and to Raymond Holden from 1925 to 1937. In addition to her poetry, Bogan was an accomplished critic and reviewer. She reviewed poetry for the New Yorker from March 1931 until December 28, 1968. In her own obituary in the New Yorker, William Maxwell wrote: “One look at her work-or sometimes one look at her---made any number of disheartened artists take heart and go on being the kind of dedicated creature they were intended to be.”

Bogan has been fortunate in her own biographers and editors. Elizabeth Frank's very fine Louise Bogan: A Portrait (Knopf, 1985) won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1986 and Bogan's own Memoir, A Journey Around my Room was skillfully edited by Ruth Limmer (New York, Viking Press, 1980). A fascinating and indispensible selection of her letters, What the Woman Lived (Harcourt Brace, 1973) was also edited by Limmer. Critical Essays on Louise Bogan was sensitively edited by poet Martha Collins, who also provides a knowledgeable and percetive indtroduction.

About Bogan, Adrienne Rich, characteristically perceptive, had this to say: , , , the problems, crises and strategies of her apparently lucid, classic poems reveal themselves: the sense of mask, of code, of body-mind division, of the sleeping fury” beneath the praised , severe, lyrical mode. Her work, like that of Bradstreet, Dickinson, and H. D., is a graph of the struggle to commit a female sensibility, in all its aspects to language. We who inherit that struggle have much to learn from her. “

"A Little history of the poems of Louise Bogan"

Louise Bogan

The poetry of Louise Bogan exhibits a disciplined, intense & concentrated simplicity of style, both graphically and verbally “classical.” The use of short lines, stanzas of three to five lines and poems a page in length was typical of the time, perhaps in reaction to the over lush poetry of the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Although a life long New Yorker, Bogan also used the natural world as well as classical myths to provide objective correlatives, if you will, for her emotional states. Masks, it is said. In fact, many of her poems, notoriously difficult to pin down in subject matter, seem to be “about” emotional states, usually involved in love, problematic and troubled love---the difficulty of love, especially for women. And of course, many are about art, the other great subject.

Her first book of poems, published when she was only 26 is entitled Body of This Death (1923), said title from Paul's Epistle to the Romans: “Oh who will deliver me from the body of this death.” The poems in the book, of which there are only 29 [she said: “I have a strong feeling that there should never be too many poems in a book of poetry. Thirty-five is, I think, the greatest number I should wish to published at one time.”]. From her first book, the poems usually mentioned by critics and reviewers are “Medusa,” “Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom,” “Women,” “Stanza,” and “Fifteenth Farewell.” “Women” is a fascinating and curious poem; seemingly critical of the (her own?) emotional life lived by most? some? all? women: “Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts/to eat dusty bread” and “Their love is an eager meaninglessness/Too tense, or too lax.” The poem's last two lines are startling advice, and seem to me to put the whole poem into the light of a plea for women to develop independent lives: “As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills/They should let it go by.” though she was married twice and had a brief relationship with the poet Theodore Roethke, she was really no wife, this one.

Her second book, Dark Summer, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1929, reprinted some (11) of the poems from Body of this Death, added 27 short lyrics and also two longer more discursive poems (which she was not to repeat). From this book, the most affecting of the new poems are “Cassandra,” “Dark Autumnal,” “Didactic Piece,” and “I saw Eternity.” Her third book, The Sleeping Fury was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1937 and contains 26 new poems. Especially nice in this collection is “M, Singing, “Baroque Comment,” and “Hypocrite Swift.” The poems seem to grow increasingly more earthy, earthbound, less tortured or full of longing. In a letter to Morton Dauwen Zabel, 27 July 1934, she said: “I can no longer put on the “lofty dissolute air” necessary for poetry's production; I cannot and I will not suffer for it any longer. With detachment and sanity I shall, in the future, observe; if to fall to the ground with my material makes me a madwoman, I abjure the trade.”
[to be continued]

"CrimeFiction"

My addiction to mysteries continues, with two books by Donna Leon, set in Venice (which of course is half the charm). The first of her series concerns a poisioned conductor at the opera and is called Murder at La Fenice. The detective, Guido Brunetti is attractive and certainly smart, but a little mysterious himself (this despite the wife at home and other homely details). The writing is gracious and interesting and the political convictions are honorable. Uniform Justice, a later book in the same series is actually much better (better paced and more complicated a crime). Interestingly enough, so far, no one ever comes to justice!