Poet and writer, born in Livermore Falls, Maine, USA. She studied at Boston University (191516), moved to New York City, and served as poetry editor of The New Yorker (193169). She was an influential critic, as in Achievement in American Poetry 19001950 (1951), and a noted lyrical poet, as in The Blue Estuaries (1968).
Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897 - 1970) was an American poet who felt that “lyric poetry if it is at all authentic…is based on some emotion—on some occasion, on some real confrontation”
Life
Louise Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine where her father Daniel Bogan worked for various paper mills and bottling factories. She spent most of her childhood years with her parents and brother growing up in mill towns in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts where Bogan and her family lived in working-class hotels and boardinghouses until 1904. During this time, Bogan was exposed to the volatile marriage of her parents brought on by her mother’s affairs which may have affected her own personal decisions as well as her poetic style later on in life.
Education
With the help of a female benefactor, Louise was able to attend the Girls’ Latin School for five years which eventually gave her the opportunity to attend Boston University. In 1916, after only completing her freshman year and giving up a fellowship to Radcliffe, she left the university to marry Curt Alexander, a corporal in the U.S. Army, but their marriage ended in 1918, Louise moved to New York to pursue a career in writing, and their only daughter Maidie Alexander was left under the care of Bogan’s parents. Four years later, she published her second book of poetry, “Dark Summer: Poems”, and shortly after was hired as a poetry editor for The New Yorker However, the past was repeated and the constant struggle between Holden’s self-indulgence and Bogan’s jealousy resulted in their divorce in 1937.
Mental Illness
Despite the hardships Bogan encountered during the twenties and thirties, she was able to experience the fascinations of the Renaissance painting, sculpture and ornament.
Bogan's Poetry and Awards
Bogan was considered not only an iconoclast, but also a moralist with a rather neurotic mind. Her "Collected Poems: 1923-1953" won her the Bollingen award in 1955 as well as an award from the Academy of American Poets in 1959, and she was the poetry reviewer of The New Yorker from 1931 until 1969, when she retired.
Her Poetic Form
Bogan's poetic style was unlike that of Ezra Pound or T.S.Elliot. Suzanne Clark, an English Professor from the University of Oregon, stated that Bogan often refers to her female speakers as "the locus of intemperate, dangerous, antisocial desires." This coincides with the notion that Bogan brought a different perspective to the traditional viewpoint of women. When others were matching their poetic form to the smooth, curvy lines of the female body, Bogan, in her modernistic milieu, used her thin poetic form to illustrate how anorexic women use their bodies.
Not only was it difficult being a woman poet in the 30s and 40s, but her lower-middle-class Irish background and limited education also brought on much ambivalence and contradiction for Louise Bogan. She even refused to review women poets in her early career and stated, “I have found from bitter experience that one woman poet is at a disadvantage in reviewing another, if the review be not laudatory.” Bogan was also not one to discuss intimate details of her life (and disdained such confessional poets as Robert Lowell and John Berryman). Later in Bogan's life, a volume of her collected works, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, was published with such poems as "The Dream" and "Women". No more struggling not to be a square.” On February 4, 1970, Louise Bogan died of a heart attack in New York City. Elizabeth Frank's biography of Louise Bogan, "Louise Bogan: A Portrait", won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Ruth Anderson's sound poem I Come Out of Your Sleep (revised and recorded on Sinopah 1997 XI) is constructed from speech sounds in Bogan's poem Little Lobelia. surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!” – Louise Bogan
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