Louise Bogan
1897-1970
Louise Bogan was born August 11,1897, in Livermore Falls, Maine, and grew up in paper mill towns in Maine, NH and Mass. Her childhood was disturbed by her parents’ differences, fueled by her mother’s tirades and infidelities. She attended Boston Girls Latin School, went to Boston University for a year, married Curt Alexander in 1916, was widowed in 1919. She moved to New York City with her daughter and worked as a writer where she connected with the city’s literary community, meeting William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson. She married writer Raymond Holden in 1925, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1937. Bogan wrote much of her poetry in the 1920′s and 1930′s. In the 1930s she began reviewing poetry for the New Yorker, a job she held for over 38 years.
Bogan was an intense and private poet, whose works reflected a sometimes tragic vision. She was reclusive, disliked talking about herself, and details of her private life are scarce. She was plagued by depression all her life and sometimes required hospitalization; her illness and pathologic jealousy ended her second marriage. Most of her poetry was written in the earlier half of her life when she published Body of This Death (1923) and Dark Summer (1929) and The Sleeping Fury (1937). She subsequently published volumes of her collected verse, and The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, an overview of her poetry. She wrote usually in lyrical forms, maintaining an intense emotional pitch, and was preoccupied with exploring the disparity of heart and mind. She died in New York City.
Poetry
Body of This Death (1923)
Collected Poems 1923-1953 (1954)
Dark Summer (1929)
Poems and New Poems (1941)
The Blue Estuaries 1923-1968 (1968)
The Sleeping Fury (1937)
Prose
Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-50 (1951)
Selected Criticism: Poetry and Prose (1955)
What the Woman Lived, selected letters (1973)