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 Perhaps there are unpublished poems in her archives at Amherst.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. “