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Louise Bogan

I lived from 1897-1970. I was from the United States, and am in the Americas category.

I was influenced by poet Theodore Roethke.

Louise Bogan was 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 majority of her poetry was written in the earlier half of her life when she published Body of This Death (1923) and Dark Summer (1929) and The Sleeping Fury (1937). She subsequently published volumes of her collected verse, and The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, an overview of her life's work in poetry. Her ability is unique in its strict adherence to lyrical forms, while maintaining a high emotional pitch: she was preoccupied with exploring the perpetual disparity of heart and mind. She died in New York City in 1970.

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  • Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom
    Men loved wholly beyond wisdom
    Have the staff without the banner.
    13 lines, 1 comment
  • The Alchemist
    I burned my life, that I might find
    A passion wholly of the mind,
    12 lines, 1 comment
  • Roman Fountain
    Up from the bronze, I saw
    Water without a flaw
    15 lines
  • Women
    Women have no wilderness in them,
    They are provident instead,
    21 lines
  • Song For The Last Act
    Now that I have your face by heart, I look
    Less at its features than its darkening frame
    27 lines
  • The Crossed Apple
    I’ve come to give you fruit from out my orchard,
    Of wide report.
    32 lines
  • The Dream
    O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
    To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows,
    16 lines
  • Tears In Sleep
    All night the cocks crew, under a moon like day,
    And I, in the cage of sleep, on a stranger's breast,
    8 lines
  • Knowledge
    Now that I know
    How passion warms little
    8 lines
  • Sonnet
    Since you would claim the sources of my thought
    Recall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,
    14 lines
1 - 10 of 27  Show all by written, popularity, title, first line

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