"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]