Louise Bogan

1897-1970

Livemore Falls


Louise Bogan was born Louise Marie Bogan in Livermore Falls, Maine, the daughter of Daniel Joseph Bogan, a superintendent in a paper mill, and Mary Helen Murphy Shields. She grew up in various mill towns in the Northeast, moving often with her parents and brother. Her parents' marriage was volatile, and her mother's affairs haunted Bogan for much of her life. She attended Boston Girls' Latin School and spent one year at Boston University. She married in 1916, but was widowed in 1920. In 1925, she married the poet Raymond Holden, whom she divorced in 1937. She was published in the New Republic, the Nation, Poetry, Scribner's and the Atlantic Monthly. For thirty-eight years, she reviewed poetry for The New Yorker .



Bogan was reclusive and disliked talking about herself so for that details are scarce regarding her private life. Most of her poetry was written in the early 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 finally, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, an overview of her life's work in poetry. She composed lyrical forms, with a high, but concentrated, refined, emotional pitch: she explored the perpetual disparity of heart and mind. She died in New York City in 1970.



Betrothed

You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,
You have said my name as a prayer.
Here where trees are planted by the water
I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,
And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say,

My mother remembers the agony of her womb
And long years that seemed to promise more than this.
She says, "You do not love me,
You do not want me,
You will go away."

In the country whereto I go
I shall not see the face of my friend
Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;
Together we shall not find
The land on whose hills bends the new moon
In air traversed of birds.

What have I thought of love?
I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow."
I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendor
As a wind out of old time . . .

But there is only the evening here,
And the sound of willows
Now and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.



BOOKS

Body of This Death (1923)
Dark Summer (1929)
The Sleeping Fury (1937)
Poems & New Poems (1941)
Collected Poems 1923-1953 (1954)
The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (1968)
A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art & Vocation (1970)
Editor, The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People (1965)
Translated poems of Goethe, Elective Affinities, (1963
Ernst Junger's The Glass Bees, (1960

Prose

     Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (1951)
     Selected Criticism: Poetry and Prose (1955)
     What the Woman Lived, selected letters (1973




Bogan Resources on the web

Louise Bogan
Biographical, historical, and critical information from the
Modern American Poetry Project website.

 


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