The
Writers
Louise Bogan
(1897-1970)
Other Links:
 Academy
of American Poets
Louise
Bogan Resource Site
Modern
American Poetry
Selected
Poetry of Louise Bogan
Works Online
The
Alchemist
Tears
In Sleep
Epitaph
for a Romantic Woman
Medusa
Portrait
A
Tale
Women
Solitary
Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell
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Louise Bogan was born on August 11,1897 in
Livermore Falls, Maine. She attended Boston Girls Latin School and went
to Boston University for a year, from 1915-1916. She married Curt Alexander
in 1916 and was widowed in 1919. After the death of her husband, she moved
to New York City with her young daughter and began working as a writer.
In New York she came into contact the city's thriving literary community,
which included writers like William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Malcolm
Cowley and Edmund Wilson. She published her first collection of poetry,
Body
of This Death in 1923. She married writer Raymond Holden in 1925. The
marriage ended in divorce in 1937. Bogan wrote much of her poetry in the
1920's and 1930's. In the 1930s, she began reviewing poetry for the New
Yorker, a job she held for over 38 years. Bogan was a very intense and
private poet, whose works reflected a very emotional and sometimes tragic
vision. In 1955 she was one of the recipients of the Bollingen Prize -
awarded by Yale University for achievement in American poetry - for her
Collected
Poems 1923-53 (1954). Many of her articles are collected in Selected
Criticism (1958) and A Poet's Alphabet (1970). Her poetry
collections include: Body of This Death (1923); Dark Summer (1929);
The
Sleeping Fury (1937); and The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968. |
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