Bogan, Louise

Louise Bogan, (born August 11, 1897, Livermore Falls, Maine, U.S.—died February 4, 1970, New York, New York), American poet and literary critic who served as poetry critic for The New Yorker from 1931 until 1969.

Bogan was born in a mill town, where her father was a clerk in a pulp mill. Her mother was given to having extramarital affairs and to disappearing for lengthy periods. The family moved often, seeking happiness and prosperity. Bogan attended a convent school and Boston’s Girls’ Latin School, where she received a classical education and faced prejudice against the Irish (she was told that she could never be editor of the school magazine). She then attended Boston University but left school after a year, in 1916, to marry a soldier. He was posted to Panama late in World War I, and after a brief, unhappy sojourn there Bogan and her daughter returned to the United States and moved in with her parents. Four years later she was left a widow. She married again in 1925, but the marriage ended in divorce in the mid-1930s. Afterward she had a brief, happy love affair with the poet Theodore Roethke. Bogan became his mentor on lyric poetry, and they were to remain friends.

Bogan’s poems were first published in The New Republic, and in 1923 her first volume appeared under the title Body of This Death. She continued to contribute both verse and criticism to The New Republic, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, and other periodicals while publishing Dark Summer (1929), The Sleeping Fury (1937), and Poems and New Poems (1941). Her verse has been frequently compared to that of the English Metaphysical poets in its restrained, intellectual style, its compressed diction and imagery, and its formal concerns. Yet it is modern, both deeply personal and immediate. Bogan was accounted one of the major American poets of her time, and she is still considered one of the country’s premier lyric poets. She received many prestigious awards. In 1944 she was a fellow in American letters at the Library of Congress, and in 1945–46 she held the chair of poetry (now poet laureate consultant in poetry) there. In 1968 Bogan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was a frequent lecturer or visiting professor at American colleges and universities.

As a critic, Bogan was known for her fairness and generosity, and she focused on the strengths of authors in works such as Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950 (1951) and Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry (1955).

Bogan’s later works include The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968 (1968) and A Poet’s Alphabet (1970). She translated The Journal of Jules Renard (1964) and Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1963) and The Sorrows of Young Werther (1971). Her letters to literary figures such as Roethke, Edmund Wilson, and May Sarton appear in What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920–1970 (1973), edited by Ruth Limner, who also structures various writings and conversations of Bogan in Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan: A Mosaic (1980).