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Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=78

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Louise Bogan including a biography, audio files, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bogan/bogan.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Louise Bogan.

BIOGRAPHY

A native of Maine, Louise Bogan grew up in an unsettled household owing, in part, to her mother's marital infidelity. After her education at Boston Girls' Latin School, Bogan attended Boston University between 1915-1916 when she married Curt Alexander, an army officer, with whom she had a daughter. Four years later, Alexander's death left her a single parent with uncertain means. Moving to New York City, Bogan began her life as a writer in earnest, collaborating with such major modernist writers as William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Lola Ridge, John Reed, Marianne Moore, and Edmund Wilson, who coached Bogan in professional reviewing that gave her an income. Her first volume of verse Body of This Death (1923) mined the resources of formal lyricism in exploring the terms of her artistic survival that ranged from depression to joy. Poetry and psychoanalysis sustained Bogan during these years through her troubled marriage to writer Raymond Holden. Her turmoil is reflected in such titles as Dark Summer (1929) and The Sleeping Fury (1937). A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation, later published in 1970, collects the pieces Bogan wrote as a poetry reviewer for the New Yorker magazine. Her visibility as a reviewer and teacher of poetry is also reflected in her critical history American Poetry, 1900-1950. Bogan's achievement as a poet, however, did not go unrecognized, and she received a Bollingen Prize in 1955, and awards from the Academy of American Poets (1959) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1967). Following her Collected Poems, 1923-1953, her last volume of verse is Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Bowles, Gloria. Louise Bogan's Aesthetic of Limitation. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1987.

Collins, Martha, Ed. Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Boston, Mass. : G.K. Hall, 1984.

Frank, Elizabeth. Louise Bogan: A Portrait. New York : A. A. Knopf, 1985.

Knox, Claire E. Louise Bogan: A Reference Resource. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990.

Ridgeway, Jacqueline. Louise Bogan. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

Upton, Lee. Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of Louise Bogan. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1996.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER