1897-1970
The pronouncement that Louise Bogan was the best American woman poet between Dickinson and Bishop would not have pleased her, for she disliked, fastidious and detached spirit that she was, all such headings and herdings; we can merely call attention to the signal merit of her narrowly focused but passionate verse, most of which was written int he first half of her life, much anthologized but, compacted as it was in the charged stanzas of the seventeen-century poets she so admired, never won "popularity" in the heart-on-the-sleeve manner of her contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Bogan was, of course, the author of six books of lyric verse, much sifted to produce, in The Blue Estuaries of 1968, a life's work of 110 poems; her several volumes of criticism, too (she served for nearly forty years as poetry critic for The New Yorker, though she discussed much more than poetry in those pages), were posthumously winnowed down to one big book, Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation", and appropriately title by her editors A Poet's Alphabet. Though the landscapes of her poetry were always American (New England and the Atlantic seaboard), there was nothing provincial about her criticism, which achieved a trenchant accounting of Gide and Rilke, of Dinesen and Lorca, of Yeats and Colette, as well as a characteristically stringent response to American classics such as Hawthorne and Dickinson, Whitman and James. Nor is it surprising that her prose carried her further into a sort of autobiographical meditation assembled by her literary executor from journals, memoirs, stories, and letters: Journey Around My Room is a great American document of ironic self-appraisal.
Yet it is the poetry which shines brightest, and will endure as the great lyric achievement of her time, the line of truth exactly superimposed on the line of feeling. The implications of her verse are best stated by Marianne Moore, who remarked in a review of her work as early as 1941, that "it is a fact as well as a mystery that weakness is power, that handicap is proficiency, that the scar is a credential, that indignation is no adversary for gratitude, or heroism for joy. There are medicines". That shrewdly accounts for the moral sense of Louise Bogan's poems, a triumph not shared, as I began by saying, by any American woman poet since Dickinson.
Louise Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, maine, on August 11, 1897. Respected as one of the most skilled crafters of poetry of her age, Luise Bogan died on February 4, 1970, in New York City.
THE DAEMON
Must I tell again
In the words I know
For the ears of men
The flesh, the blow?
Must I show outright
The bruise in the side,
The halt in the night,
and how death cried?
Must I speak to the lot
Who little bore?
It said Why not?
It said Once more.
THE DREAM
O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows.
Fear kept for thirty-five years poured through his mane,
And retribution equally old, or nearly, breathed through his nose.
Coward complete, I lay and wept on the ground
When some strong creature appeared, and leapt for the rein.
Another woman, as I lay half in a sound,
Leapt int he air, and clutched at the leather and chain.
Give him, she said, something of yours as a charm.
Throw him, she said, some poor thing you alone claim.
No, no, I cried, he hates me; he's out for harm,
And whether I yield or not, it is all the same.
But, like a lion in a legend, when I flung the glove
Pulled from my sweating, my cold right hand,
The terrible beast, that no one may understand,
Came to my side, and put down his head in love.
Bibliography:
Bogar, Louise, 1972. A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bogar, Louise, 1994. The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968. New York: Farrar.
Knox, Clair E, 1990. Louise Bogan, A Reference Source. Scarecrow Press: Michigan University.
Peterson, Douglas Lee 1952. A Critical Study of the Poetry of Louise Bogan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ridgeway, Jaqueline 1984. Louise Bogan. New York: Twayne.
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