& # 8217 ; s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper

Wendy Hirsch

Bogan

was born Louise Marie Bogan in Livermore Falls, Maine, the girl of Daniel Joseph

Bogan, a overseer in a paper factory, and Mary Helen Murphy Shields. She grew up in

assorted factory towns in the Northeast, traveling frequently with her parents and brother. Her

parents & # 8217 ; matrimony was volatile, and her female parent & # 8217 ; s personal businesss haunted Bogan for much of her

life.

Although Bogan attended Boston University for merely one twelvemonth in 1915-1916, her early

instruction at Boston Girls & # 8217 ; Latin School gave her a strict foundation. She was already

composing poesy and reading Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in its first issues in 1912.

While modernism in literature and the humanistic disciplines was deriving in impulse and form, Bogan was

softly get the hanging prosodies and specifying her manner. She subsequently wrote passionately about her

artistic waking up, depicting a visit to her female parent in the infirmary. There in the room

she saw a vase of marigolds: “ Suddenly I recognized something at one time simple

and full of the extreme profusion of design and contrast that was mine. ” Design and

contrast are at the bosom of her formal poesy, and the manner that she crafted early did

non vary much throughout her ulterior old ages.

She married Curt Alexander in 1916, but the matrimony was non a happy one. They had one

girl, born merely a twelvemonth subsequently. By 1920 Bogan was a widow ( she had earlier separated

from her hubby ) , left with a kid to care for and without a dependable income. After

traveling to New York City, where she would populate for the remainder of her life, Bogan started to

piece together the life of a on the job author. She shortly met other authors in the metropolis & # 8217 ; s

booming literary community: William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Lola Ridge, John

Reed ( 1887-1920 ) , Marianne Moore, and, most of import, Edmund Wilson, who became her early

wise man. Wilson, already a adult male of repute, urged her to compose reappraisals of literature for

periodicals, and this finally became a steady beginning of income.

A twelvemonth after modernism peaked in 1922 with T. S. Eliot & # 8217 ; s The Waste Land, Bogan

published her first book, Body of This Death. In contrast to Eliot & # 8217 ; s expansive,

associatory, free poetry, Bogan & # 8217 ; s wordss were brief, limited in subject, and extremely formal.

The volume, which was good received although many referees found the poesy obscure,

speaks articulately about love and heartache, Bogan & # 8217 ; s duplicate subjects. At this clip she was seeing a

head-shrinker to assist her conflict the depressions that unrelentingly beset her and

on occasion hospitalized her. Her life and her wordss are closely intertwined,

although Bogan would be the last individual to clarify the connexion. She was intensely

private ; for old ages many of her friends did non cognize she had a girl.

Bogan had married once more in 1925, this clip to the author Raymond Holden. This matrimony,

like the first, was troubled and did non last. Despite the personal convulsion, the 1920s and

1930s were Bogan & # 8217 ; s most productive poetic old ages. She published Dark Summer in 1929

and her 3rd volume, The Sleeping Fury, in 1937. Other books that followed

chiefly collected antecedently published work and added a few new verse forms. The authorship procedure

for Bogan was painful and demanding ; verse forms came seldom and at a cost. Her verse form “ The

Daemon ” depicts her Muse as a monster demanding disclosures once more and once more. Much of

her work, in fact, draws upon the subjects of silence and linguistic communication every bit good as upon the

failure of love.

During the 1930s, when many of her author friends turned to the left, Bogan fought a

lonely conflict for literary pureness. She was inexorable that political relations had no topographic point in poesy ;

art called for something grander and more honest. Additionally, she saw the impermanent

desertion of her friends ( Edmund Wilson, Rolfe Humphries, L? onie Adams ) as grounds of

rational and emotional failing and as a treachery of the authorization of the ego.

During this decennary she began reexamining poesy for the New Yorker, a occupation she held

for 38 old ages. Many of these reappraisals, every bit good as others, are collected in Angstrom

Poet & # 8217 ; s Alphabet: Contemplations on the Literary Art and Vocation ( 1970 ) . Her prose is

direct, nonacademic, and crisp. The series of articles on her two favourite poets, William

Butler Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, is peculiarly insightful. The poet W H. Auden

idea she was the best critic of poesy in America.

Her occasional instruction stretchs, which began in the 1940s, were another, more direct manner

to act upon the heads of immature people. As the strain of composing poesy increased, Bogan

turned more and more to unfavorable judgment and instruction. In 1951 she was commissioned to compose a

short history of American poesy, finally published as Accomplishment in American

Poetry, 1900-1950, in which she does non once reference herself. She besides translated

poesy and prose and worked with younger authors ( William Maxwell, for illustration ) to assist

them purify beauty and truth from their authorship.

The reappraisal of her last aggregations were look up toing, if softly so. Her 2nd

aggregation, Collected Poems, 1923-1953 ( Poems and New Poems had come out in 1941 ) ,

won a shared Bollingen Prize in 1955. Nonetheless, for most of her composing life she felt

unseeable in the literary universe. Late in her life fiscal loads eased slightly, helped

in big portion by a pecuniary award from the Academy of American Poets in 1959 and another

from the National Endowment for the Humanistic disciplines in 1967. Her concluding and most complete aggregation, The

Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 ( 1968 ) , contains merely 103 verse forms. She died entirely in

her New York flat, contending the familiar depression she had wrestled with all her

life.

Interest from feminist circles in the concealed lives of adult females authors has prompted new

appraisals of Bogan. The “ Mosaic ” of her autobiographical pieces, Journey

around My Room ( 1980 ) , and the Pulitzer Prize-winning life by Elizabeth Frank, Louise

Bogan: A Portrait ( 1985 ) , have introduced her to the general populace. Yet Bogan remains

a poet & # 8217 ; s poet, giving beauty to those whose ear, head, and bosom are unfastened to the demands

of her poesy. Her work is peculiarly of import in visible radiation of her topographic point in the company of

other modernists. In a clip of experimentation, of a general relaxation of constructions and

topics, she held the line for formal poesy and for the precise blend of emotion and

mind to inspire that poesy.

Bogan & # 8217 ; s documents, including manuscripts for many of the verse forms, are held at Amherst

College Special Collections, Amherst, Mass. The most helpful beginning is Claire E. Knox & # 8217 ; s

annotated bibliography, Louise Bogan: A Reference Source ( 1990 ) . For a gustatory sensation of

Bogan & # 8217 ; s humor, her spirited letters, What the Woman Lived: Selected Letterss of

Louise Bogan, 1920-1970, ed. Ruth Limmer ( 1973 ) , should non be missed. Important

reappraisals are collected in Martha Collins, Critical Essays on Louise Bogan ( 1984 ) .

The lone full-length surveies are Jacqueline Ridgeway & # 8217 ; s general debut, Louise

Bogan ( 1984 ) , and Gloria Bowles & # 8217 ; s women’s rightist reading, Louise Bogan & # 8217 ; s Aesthetic of

Restriction ( 1987 ) . Obituaries are in the New York Times, 5 Feb. 1970, and the New

Yorker, 14 Feb. 1970.

From American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Copyright? 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.