Born in Livermore Falls, Maine, in 1897. She attended Boston Girls' Latin School and spent one year at Boston University. She married in 1916 and was widowed in 1920. In 1925, she married her second husband, the poet Raymond Holden, whom she divorced in 1937. Her poems were published in the New Republic, the Nation, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Scribner's and Atlantic Monthly. For thirty-eight years, she reviewed poetry for The New Yorker.
Bogan found the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell and John Berryman distasteful and self-indulgent. With the poets whose work she admired, however, such as Theodore Roethke, she was extremely supportive and encouraging. She was reclusive and disliked talking about herself, and for that reason details are scarce regarding her private life. The majo ...
Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.
I had a Socrates-like teacher who knew Ms. Bogan. He gave me Williams' Little Treasury of Modern Poetry which has a " botched photo" of Bogan in it, and some of her poetry. I thank my teacher.
Last Hill in a Vista, I enjoyed this poem about nature and may come to read more of this ladies work,
Re Louise Bogan: Mary Gordon, in her essay 'Getting There from Here' (republished in Gordon's 1991 book 'Good Boys and Dead Girls and Other Essays' quotes a Gordon poem, 'Saint Christopher', in its entirety. A quick online search appears to show that a manuscript of this poem is included in a list of Bogan's papers maintained at Georgetown University. But the poem does not appear to be in Poemhunter's 'All Poems' list for Bogan. Can you add it? Did Bogan write other poems about saints? Thanks, Joseph N. DiStefano, Philadelphia distefano251@hotmail.com
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 swound
Leapt in the 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 is 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.
i think that she is a really good writer