The fourth Poet Laureate, Louise Bogan (b. 1897- d.1970), was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, and was educated at the Girls' Latin High School. Later she attended one year at Boston University. Her first marriage, to Curt Alexander, an army officer, in 1916, was in effect over by 1918. The couple had one daughter Maidie, born Oct. 19, 1917, but the child was raised by Bogan's parents. Alexander died in 1920.
In 1923, a year after she received the first of three Guggenheim fellowships (1922, 1933, 1937), her first book of poetry, Body of this Death: Poems, came out.
Ms. Bogan married poet Raymond Holden in 1925. This was followed by her second book, Dark Summer: Poems, in 1929. Ms. Bogan endured bouts of mental illness from 1931 on, the year that The New Yorker hired her as poetry editor, a post she carried out faultlessly for 38 years.
Her third book of poems, The Sleeping Fury, was published in 1937, the year she divorced Holden. This book reflected her experience with love, which grew to include an affair with the American poet, Theodore Roethke. She became Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (the old title for the position currently known as the US Poet Laureate) in 1945-46.
Ms. Bogan also translated literature from French and German late in life.
A list of the major events of her life follow:
1916
Ms Bogan married Curt Alexander, but it was a bad marriage, and the couple separated and in 1920 her estranged husband died leaving her with a daughter to raise alone.
1922
She published her first book,
Body of This Death
She got her first Guggenheim fellowship.
1925
Ms Bogan married again, this time to the poet Raymond Holden.
1929
She published her second book of poetry, Dark Summer.
1930
She won the John Reed Memorial Prize from Poetry.
1931 to 1969
She reviewed poetry for 38 years for the New Yorker magazine
1933
Ms. Bogan received her second Guggenheim fellowship.
1937
She published her third book of poetry, Sleeping Fury
She got her third Guggenheim fellowship.
She divorced her second husband Raymond Holden
1941
She published Collected Poems, 1923-1953 (Poems and New Poems)
1945 to 1941
She was appointed the Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry
1948
She won the Harriet Monroe Award.
1951
Ms Bogan was commissioned to write a short history of American poetry, eventually published as Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950.
1952
Ms. Bogan was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
1954
She won the Bollingen Prize.
1968
Ms. Bogan published
The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968.
1969
She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1973
What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970, ed. Ruth Limmer
1980
Ms Bogan wrote a fragmented collection autobiographical sketches called, Journey around My Room
1984
Critical Essays on Louise Bogan by Martha Collins
1985
Elizabeth Frank won the Pulitzer Prize-for her biography, Louise Bogan: A Portrait a book that made Ms. Bogan even better known.
1970
Ms Bogan died of a heart attack on February 4.
What follows are two examples of Ms. Bogan's poetry.
The Frightened Man
In fear of the rich mouth
I kissed the thin,--
Even that was a trap
To snare me in.
Even she, so long
The frail, the scentless,
Is become strong,
And proves relentless.
O, forget her praise,
And how I sought her
Through a hazardous maze
By shafted water.
Words For Departure
Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten.
When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer pavements,
The window-sills were wet from rain in the night,
Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots
As among grotesque trees.
Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond.
Slight-voiced bells separated hour from hour,
The afternoon sifted coolness
And people drew together in streets becoming deserted.
There was a moon, and light in a shop-front,
And dusk falling like precipitous water.
Hand clasped hand
Forehead still bowed to forehead--
Nothing was lost, nothing possessed
There was no gift nor denial.
2
I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.
You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.
You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.
3
You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.
Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.
But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd--strike the thing short off;
Be mad--only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.
And go away without fire or lantern
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.
