Acclaimed as reviewer, autobiographer, and poet, Louise Bogan earned a place among the female voices of the mid-twentieth century. As a distinct loner living in a clannish New York circle, she produced an idiosyncratic style marked by epigram, dreamy landscapes, terse phrasing, and incisive images of sexual betrayal and patriarchal constraints on women. Of her 105 published titles, the majority are brief, but pungent and darkly truth-laden. She was much admired by Ford Madox Ford and Allen Tate. Her accomplished lyrics, conflicted subjects, and powerful physicality anticipated the themes and subjects of May Sarton and Sylvia Plath.
Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, on August 11, 1897. She attended Mount St. Mary’s Academy before entering Boston’s Girls’ Latin School. In her mid-teens, she turned from fantasies of the operatic stage to poetry, which she published in the school journal, The Jabberwork, and in the Boston Evening Transcript. She patterned her writings after the late Victorians Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, as well as the works of William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
While at Boston University, Bogan published in the Boston University Beacon. To her mother’s dismay, before her sophomore year, she chose marriage to Silesian army officer Curt Alexander over a scholarship to Radcliffe. During World War I, the couple settled first in New York, then in Ancon, Panama, where she gave birth to a daughter, Mathilde, affectionately called “Maidie.” Bogan returned to New York to contemplate the emotional upheavals of motherhood and marriage to a demanding, self-centered mate. Shortly after Bogan’s older brother Charles died in combat, the marriage frayed. In 1920, Alexander died of pneumonia following ulcer surgery. A widow’s pension freed her to study piano in Vienna. In 1925, she married poet and bank researcher Raymond Holden, a charming, romantic wit. She remained with him until their divorce in 1937.
A private person, Bogan settled in New York and sent Maidie to live with her parents in Massachusetts. She supported herself by clerking in a bookshop and working in a public library, and she made a new home among Greenwich Village radicals Louise Bryant and John Reed and notable literati William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, and Conrad Aiken. Writing in the style of metaphysical poet John Donne, she submitted highly compressed, personal poems to various publications before issuing Body of This Death (1923) and Dark Summer (1929). She richly detailed both volumes with erotic fantasy and disdain for male-centered marriage. Subsequent contributions appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, Scribner’s, and Atlantic Monthly and won her Poetry magazine’s 1930 John Reed Memorial Prize. In 1931, she joined The New Yorker staff as poetry critic, a post she held until 1969.
Bogan’s work suffered from disruptions, first by a fire in 1929, which destroyed her manuscripts, then by loss of Holden’s inheritance in the stock market crash, and finally by depression, which required hospitalization at the New York Neurological Institute. Illness and her pathologic jealousy ended her second marriage. Vivid self-revelation energizes The Sleeping Fury (1937), published the year she was divorced. She followed with Poems and New Poems (1941) and two works of criticism: the highly successful Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950 (1951) and Selected Criticism: Poetry and Prose (1955). Her Collected Poems (1954) won the Bollingen Prize.
Bogan’s accomplishments include a $10,000 National Endowment for the Arts award; publication of her entire canon in The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968 (1968), and her election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which honored her most enduring verse. In 1964, she published The Journal of Jules Renard, co-translated by Elizabeth Roget. After a fatal heart attack in her New York apartment on February 4, 1970, a posthumous collection, A Poet’s Alphabet (1970), amassed her critical reviews of the influential poets of the age. It was followed by three more posthumous publications: a translation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther; Novella (1971), collected letters to female friends in What the Woman Lived (1973); and a painfully honest, witty autobiography, Journey Around My Room (1980).
