Louise Bogan

Who Was Louise Bogan?

Louise Bogan was one of the finest lyric poets of the twentieth century and the most important American woman poet between Amy Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop — a writer whose small, perfectly finished body of work represents the formal lyric tradition at its most disciplined and most emotionally concentrated. Born in Livermore Falls, Maine, she grew up in a chaotic household marked by her mother’s mental instability and infidelities, an experience that shaped her psychological life and her poetry’s characteristic combination of formal control and suppressed intensity.

She served as poetry critic for The New Yorker from 1931 to 1969 — one of the longest and most influential tenures in the history of American literary criticism — and her reviews shaped the reception of poetry for a generation. Her own poetry, collected in Body of This Death (1923), Dark Summer (1929), The Sleeping Fury (1937), and The Blue Estuaries (1968), is notable for its refusal of the confessional and its insistence on the impersonal, the formal, and the controlled.

Bogan suffered two serious breakdowns and spent time in sanitariums, but she maintained through all of this a commitment to the rigors of the craft that she regarded as both artistic and moral. Her poetry is significant for TLA because it represents the formal lyric tradition’s capacity to render deep suffering with precision and without sentimentality.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Body of This Death — 1923
• Dark Summer — 1929
• The Sleeping Fury — 1937
• Poems and New Poems — 1941
• The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 — 1968