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Criticism
Sheri E. Metzger
Metzger has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature. Metzger teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the University Honors Program. In this essay, Metzger explores the fractured depiction of self in Bogan's "Words for Departure," which she suggests can be read as an icon of the poet's own childhood experiences.
In composing poetry, Bogan used a variety of poetic forms, but the poems in Body of This Death, and the poem that is the subject of this essay, "Words for Departure," are lyric poems, often defined by their emotional response to the grief, chaos, and betrayal associated with love. Bogan writes in her autobiography Journey around My Room that lyric poetry is "the most intense, the most condensed, the most purified form of language," and thus it is to be expected that she would turn to lyric poetry to express the fabric of emotion that is rendered by the betrayal of love. Bogan was an intensely private person, who rarely revealed the personal details of her own life. The posthumous publication of her autobiography and letters opened her life to study and to the inevitable rereading of her poetry in a search for the connections between her poems and the events and people depicted in her autobiographical writings. As only one example of what might be constructed from an examination of these connections, Bogan's poem "Words for Departure" can be examined as illustrating an effort by Bogan to locate herself in her poems of betrayed love.
Many critics have cited Bogan's turbulent childhood, her mother's infidelity, and Bogan's first marriage as explanation of why Bogan's many poems in her first collection of poetry, Body of This Death, are so centered on betrayal. In her autobiography, Bogan recounts episodes of her life, always presented as brief vignettes, like photos in an album that reveal the incongruity of her life. Many of the episodes that involve her mother are marked by tumult and discord. As a response to all this strife, Bogan also notes something as simple as her mother sewing, the click of a needle against a thimble, as a moment "that meant peace." There must have been much discord for Bogan, who, writing so many years after the events that are recalled, remembers a needle click as a particular sound that suggested peace in this stormy household. Bogan also writes of her mother's friend Dede, whose presence scared the child and who brought disruption to the house as she acted as "go-between" between Bogan's mother and her lover. Bogan knew that her mother had lovers, had even walked in unexpectedly and caught her mother with her lover. Thus, it is easy to appreciate Bogan's comments that when her mother "dressed to go to town, the fear came back." These trips meant "going to the city; it meant her other world; it meant trouble." Bogan's mother was prone to sudden anger, blaming everyone, and presumably her daughter, when things went wrong. Her mother would suddenly disappear for weeks and then just as suddenly reappear, creating tumult and tension in her daughter's life.
Still another betrayal occured in 1909 when Bogan's family moved to Boston. Bogan was only a teenager when she began to study drawing with a Miss Cooper, whom the young girl began to idolize as genteel and refined — the qualities that Bogan's mother most lacked and that the young girl most admired. Miss Cooper was thought to be perfect, for about two years. Bogan was about fifteen years old when she discovered that her idol was human, and she writes in her autobiography that Miss Cooper betrayed her. The betrayal was as simple as a sigh, a moment that signaled dissatisfaction or discontent, or perhaps boredom. Whatever the meaning of the sigh, the perfection of Miss Cooper's persona was disrupted, never to reappear. Bogan's days at the drawing studio had given her a peaceful retreat from her mother's chaotic world, and so the betrayal was all the more painful. She describes angry tears, disillusionment, and dismay. Bogan's reaction was extreme, but this disillusionment, coupled with all the chaos and betrayal of her early life, eventually led a very young Bogan to marry an unsuitable older man as a means of escape. She did not write of the marriage in her autobiography, but when asked what she has sought in her life, she replied that she sought love. She explains that she has sought love because she "worked from memory and example." Her mother constantly sought reassurance of her own worth in love affairs, and Bogan experienced her father's anger and the fighting between parents. Bogan writes in her autobiography how all the agony of her childhood "has long been absorbed" into her work. It is this absorption of agony that Bogan captures and reveals in "Words for Departure."
In her essay "Lethal Brevity: Louise Bogan's Lyric Career," Marcia Aldrich says, "[l]ike many other writers early in the century, Bogan turned cultural and personal disappointments into modernist poetry." In her discussion of Body of This Death, Aldrich charges that the subject of "women in the throes of love" is a traditional one for poets, but that in this instance "the volume finds that the literary life of feeling is one of depersonalization and disillusionment." The poems in Body of This Death provide no happy endings, as the title certainly suggests. The poems contained within, according to Aldrich, "define a possessive love between unequal lovers." This critique is certainly true of "Words for Departure." In the poem, it is the male lover who holds all the power. Regardless of the depth of her love for him, the speaker cannot prevent his leaving. All control rests with the male lover and not with the female narrator, and as Aldrich suggests, these lovers are unequal. And yet, as Christine Colasurdo notes in "The Dramatic Ambivalence of Self in the Poetry of Louise Bogan," Bogan's poems are not victim poems. Colasurdo suggests that "What appear to be victim poems are in fact celebrations of the self's emergence from family constraints, failed love, and rigid gender roles." Bogan is a woman who has survived her family and her husband. It is not easy for Bogan to reveal herself, and as Colasurdo observes, Bogan was "a poet who vigorously avoided self-display in her life and work." And yet, she is a poet who also created poems that use the language of suppression and silence.
Although Bogan does use the language of self-suppression, especially in her multiple uses of the word "nothing" in "Words for Departure," she also reveals the painful experience of love, especially in the last line of the poem: "Let there be some uncertainty about your departure." As a child and as a young wife, Bogan experienced many departures. Her ambivalence at these many comings and goings is part of what creates so much tension in her poetry. In his essay "The Re-Making of a Poet: Louise Bogan," Lee Upton points out that Bogan seems to present "a closed face" to critics. Consequently, Bogan emerges as stern and limited and perceived as a poet who depicts "female victims without imagining a more compelling conception of women." Noting that Bogan's poems are "profoundly oppositional," Upton explains that "[s]eparation rather than unity propels her poetics." In "Words for Departure," a lover leaves. He also leaves behind anger, grief, and betrayal. These are mismatched lovers; one, perhaps a man, but equally possibly a woman, is secretive. This lover is the "rind"; nothing is known of the interior, what this lover is feeling or thinking. This lover has mysteries to unlock, words and feelings that remain hidden. The other lover is the opposite, the interior, the "white-juiced apple"; everything is known and nothing is hidden. As Bogan notes in her autobiography, separations, secrets, and deception defined her childhood. Her poetry is charged with her personal story of betrayal. Bogan, whose public "closed face" gives away nothing of her personal life, gives voice to a lover's betrayal in "Words for Departure." Her mother had "her fantasies, her despairs, her secrets, her subterfuges." She was like the rind, the lover whose secrets and whose departure brings such pain.
Upton also indicates that it is Bogan's position as an outsider that leads to many of the oppositional forces found in her poems. Bogan writes in her autobiography that she was "a member of a racial and religious minority." She knew this from a young age; she experienced the bigotry directed against Irish Catholics, and she understood that she "was a 'Mick,'" regardless of her other "faults or virtues." Her status as an outsider, says Upton, can be found in her poetry: "[d]ivided voices dominate her work and require that we read her poems not as simple polemics but as explorations of multiple levels of psychological crisis." The opposition noted in "Words for Departure," the countering of "Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten," the repetition of this parallelism throughout the poem — these are Bogan's divided voice. She creates divisions and breaks in unity in her poetry, just as her life was a series of moves, separations, betrayals, and broken attachments. In exploring meaning in Bogan's poetry, Upton suggests that for Bogan "separation became a means of survival." While still quite young, she removed herself from her parents and husband and even her young daughter, and moved to New York City to live on her own. This leaving is what she understands as normal, given her own childhood experiences.
Bogan, who had so little control over her childhood existence, tried as an adult to control her own life. In her essay "Music in the Granite Hill," Deborah Pope suggests that the women in Bogan's poems "struggle to establish a sense of selfhood and control over their emotional and social environments, which constantly operate to defeat them." Pope proposes that "Words for Departure" is part of a poetic sequence that reveals the emotional turmoil of Bogan's failed marriage. As Pope also notes, with so much turmoil in her own early life, Bogan sought control in her poetry. "Words for Departure" reveals a stasis in the poet's world. Each movement of the poem is balanced; lines and phrasing are parallel, the oppositions counterpoised and the symmetry clear. Nothing is out of control, and yet, one lover is leaving and another is in pain. Yet even that inequity is equal. The lover does leave, but the other lover assumes control also. It is this lover's voice that is heard in the poem and this lover who demands that her lover leave in the dark. It is the abandoned lover who issues warning and it is this lover who commands the reader's attention. Like Bogan, this lover is a survivor. Upton suggests that Bogan's poetry "explores the unconscious dynamics of women's experience." It may also reveal the dynamics of Bogan's own life.
Source: Sheri E. Metzger, Critical Essay on "Words for Departure," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Brett C. Millier
In the following essay, Miller discusses Bogan's education, her passionate nature, and her contributions to poetry.
The critic Malcolm Cowley remarked in a review of Louise Bogan's slim volume Poems and New Poems (1941) that she had "done something that has been achieved by very few of her contemporaries: she has added a dozen or more to our small stock of memorable lyrics. She has added nothing whatever to our inexhaustible store of trash." Bogan's reputation as a poet is secure on exactly that scale. She is remembered and studied as one of the finest lyric poets America has produced, though the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending. Her achievement in poetry has also been overshadowed by her extensive critical writings; for thirty-eight years she was the poetry critic for The New Yorker magazine, the arbiter of taste in such matters for a literate and influential audience.
Louise Bogan was born of the unhappy marriage of Daniel and May Shields Bogan in Livermore Falls, Maine, a bustling mill town on the Androscoggin River. In 1897, the year of Louise's birth, Daniel Bogan was superintendent in a pulp mill in the town, the first of many such relatively white-collar mill jobs he would hold during her childhood. Louise was their third child; a son, Charles, had been born in 1884, and a second son, Edward, had died in infancy. Bogan grew up in the Irish communities of deepest New England, moving often with her family to a variety of hotels and boardinghouses and other temporary dwellings: to Milton, New Hampshire, in 1901; to Ballardvale, Massachusetts, in 1904; to Roxbury, near Boston, in 1909. These moves were prompted both by economics and by the family's unhappiness. May Shields Bogan was a beautiful and unstable woman prone to flaunting her many extramarital affairs (on at least one occasion witnessed by her daughter) and to mysterious and lengthy disappearances.
Despite these disruptions, Bogan was quite well educated, in a New Hampshire convent (1906 – 1908) and at Boston's excellent Girls' Latin School (1910 – 1915), where she received a classical education in Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, history, science, and the arts. Having fallen under the poetic spell of A. C. Swinburne and the French Symbolists, she was a constant contributor to Latin's literary magazine, The Jabberwock, until she was told by the headmaster to trim her ambitions: "No Irish girl could be editor of the school magazine." Such prejudice was prevalent in Boston at the time, and Bogan never ceased to resent it. She transcended these limitations, however, and continued to publish her high school poems, including four in the Boston Evening Transcript, and was named class poet. She was a wide and constant reader who followed her own tastes and developed early and intense literary ambitions.
The difficulties and instabilities of her childhood produced in Bogan a preoccupation with betrayal and a distrust of others, a highly romantic nature, and a preference for the arrangements of art over grim, workaday reality. She would suffer for most of her life from serious depression, which resulted in three lengthy hospital stays for treatment. She would drink heavily, and her work would suffer from what Elizabeth Frank in Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1985) has called "a principle of arrest": "Something stopped Louise Bogan dead in her tracks, not once, but many times." But her fine early education would form the foundation of her poetry and criticism, as would, in some sense, her unhappiness.
Sent by her parents to Boston University in 1916, Bogan did extremely well and earned a scholarship to Radcliffe for her sophomore year. She turned it down, however, for the chance to leave home in the company of a husband, Curt Alexander, a soldier of German origin nine years her senior. She moved with her husband to New York City, and then, when war was declared in 1917, to Panama, where she gave birth to their daughter, Mathilde (Maidie) Alexander. Miserable in the role of military wife and in the heat and humidity of Panama, Bogan wrote poems about her condition, including "Betrothed" (which appeared in her first collection) and "The Young Wife" (which she never collected) and schemed to get back to New England. She left Panama with her child in May 1918 and moved in with her parents in Massachusetts. At the end of the war she was briefly reconciled with her husband, and they lived for a time on army bases near Portland, Maine, and near Hoboken, New Jersey. In the summer of 1919 she left Alexander for good, delivering her daughter to her parents and finding herself an apartment in New York from which to launch her career as a woman of letters. Alexander died in 1920, and his army widow's pension enabled Bogan to stay in the city.
From her temporary job at Brentano's bookstore in New York, Bogan quickly became involved in the city's active literary community. Her earliest friendships included Lola Ridge, Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Maxwell Bodenheim, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Conrad Aiken, and, most important, Edmund Wilson. At the fringes of, but deeply skeptical about, the leftist politics common in the group, Bogan nonetheless found herself in an intense love affair with a young radical named John Coffey, who would shoplift (his speciality was furs) and then plead the cause of the poor in his courtroom appearances. Bogan drove the getaway car on one of these escapades, a fact that embarrassed her from time to time for the rest of her life. When Coffey finally succeeded in making his motives clear to a judge, he was committed to a hospital for the insane.
Bogan set about educating herself and honing her writing skills with great seriousness and dedication. Ever conscious of her educational deficiencies (she carried a lifelong resentment toward people with advanced degrees), she sought to make up for them by reading. In this period she discovered the poetry of William Butler Yeats, who, like Rainer Maria Rilke and W. H. Auden later, would become a poetic touchstone and an important influence on her work. Bogan's poems appeared in the best journals of her day, almost from the beginning of her stay in New York. She published often in Harriet Monroe's influential Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and was involved from the start with The Measure, a "little magazine" devoted to the formal lyric. She became acquainted with the work of the most important female poets of the day, including Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as the poetry of Edward Arlington Robinson, perhaps her most direct American influence. Also through her work on The Measure (and a brief stint as a card filer in the office of the anthropologist William Fielding Ogburn) she met and became friendly with Margaret Mead and the poet Léonie Adams. In 1922 Bogan spent six months alone in Vienna, absorbing European culture and writing, and by the fall of 1923 she had secured a publisher, Robert M. McBride, for her first book of poems.
Body of This Death (1923) contains several of Bogan's most memorable poems and in general reveals its author's preoccupations and tastes. Betrayal, particularly sexual betrayal, is a constant theme, though the poems are in no way "confessional." In private writing included in Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan (1980), Bogan echoes Emerson's charge that the poet tell his life story in "cipher": "The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself. The repressed becomes the poem. Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there."
Like Emily Dickinson's "gift of screws," Bogan's poems are made of meticulously distilled experience, distanced from the source by objective language. Often presented by their titles as songs or chants or arias, her poems call attention to themselves as rhetorical acts in a common language. Such commitment to public discourse did not protect Bogan from occasional obscurity — the distillation sometimes reduced emotion to indecipherable symbolism. But Bogan saw herself in the tradition of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English lyric poetry, and she disciplined her poetic emotion to the formal rhyme and meter she instinctively preferred. Her well-known poem "The Alchemist" speaks to the method:
I burned my life,
that I might find A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.
The poem's concluding second stanza admits the necessity of "unmysterious flesh" after all.
Several of the poems in Body of This Death address specifically female concerns and point to Bogan's ambivalent relationship with the tradition of female lyric poets. Her poems are by no means dogmatically feminist; Bogan held a deep distrust for all ideological commitment. In fact, she has been castigated somewhat unfairly by contemporary feminists for the dry pronouncements of her much-anthologized lyric "Women": "Women have no wilderness in them, /They are provident instead, /Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts /To eat dusty bread." Missing the ironic self-criticism in the poem ("As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills /They should let it go by"), feminist critics have read it as general condemnation of women and their ways of viewing experience. While the situation of women in Bogan's poems is rarely preferred to the situation of men, she is capable of wise and penetrating insight. "Betrothed," "Portrait," "My Voice Not Being Proud," "Medusa," "The Crows," "The Changed Woman," "Chanson Un Peu Naïve," and "Fifteenth Farewell" are all strong poems with female speakers or subjects. She saw herself and her work as arising from that definite tradition of female lyricists, represented in the generation just older than Bogan herself by the strong figures of Sara Teasdale, Millay, and Wylie. For Marianne Moore and Hilda Doolittle, the more typically modernist women poets of the period, she felt less affinity.
Early in 1924 Bogan's close friend Edmund Wilson suggested that she try her hand at criticism. That spring she published her first book review, of D. H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), in The New Republic. She would continue to write poetry reviews for the rest of her life, and as poems came to her less and less frequently as she grew older, Bogan became better known as a critic than as a poet. In 1931 she wrote her first review for The New Yorker, and twice a year until 1969 she presented the season's new poetry books to that magazine's discriminating audience while also continuing to write for The New Republic and the Nation.
Bogan's predilections in her criticism are similar to those in her poems: she showed a marked preference for crafted eloquence over free-verse expansiveness; she directed her readers away from contemporary fashions and toward what she called in the February 1925 issue of The Measure "the heft and swing of English poetry in the tradition"; and she would tolerate no slackness in thought or expression. She thought of herself as educating her audiences and shared with them the enthusiasms of her own reading, particularly William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W. H. Auden. She was critical when she saw the need to be, regardless of her relationship to the writer, and she lost friends in the process. In 1932 she reviewed her friend Allen Tate so harshly that he wrote to protest. Her reply, in a private letter dated 1 April, defended her objective view: "I was reviewing a book of poetry which aroused in me respect and irritation in about equal measure. If you objected to the tone of my review, I objected, straight down to a core beyond detachment, to the tone of some of the poems."
In 1925 Bogan married Raymond Holden, a sometime poet and novelist who had been a friend of Robert Frost. She retrieved her daughter from her parents and moved with Holden to Boston. Although Holden came from a wealthy family, he was in financial straits by the time he married Bogan. From the start their marriage suffered from economic strain, but for a time the relationship was relatively happy. They moved in a social and literary circle that included Rolfe Humphries and Adams, both of whom would be lifelong friends to Bogan. In 1926 they moved back to New York but spent the winter in Sante Fe, New Mexico, for Holden's health. In 1928 they bought a farmhouse in Hillsdale, New York, and amid the chaos of renovations Bogan found a measure of happiness and new poems. But in December 1929 the house burned to the ground (including almost all of Bogan's books, letters, and manuscripts). While the insurance money enabled the couple to set up a new life in New York, the happiest period in Bogan's life had clearly come to an end.
Dark Summer (1929), her second volume of poetry, marks Bogan's first work with her most helpful editor, John Hall Wheelock of Scribners. In what would become a pattern in Bogan's publishing life, the volume includes a selection of poems from Body of This Death as well as new work, which included the only two long poems she ever published: "The Flume," an autobiographical narrative based on the many waterways of her mill-town childhood (which she never again included in a collection); and "Summer Wish," a moving argument between two voices concerning the possibility of spring's renewal and the necessity for acceptance in fall. "Summer Wish" reflects the contemplative happiness of Bogan's stay in the house in Hillsdale and as such was almost anachronistic by the time it saw print.
The shorter lyrics of Dark Summer again show Bogan's mastery of observation, diction, meter, and rhyme in poems that generally emphasize acceptance and fulfillment rather than the disappointment and betrayal of her earlier work. "Cassandra" captures the mythical figure's sorrowing mood: "To me, one silly task is like another. /I bare the shambling tricks of lust and pride. /This flesh will never give a child its mother." "Winter Swan" and "The Cupola" show the poet's descriptive powers, reminiscent of those of Moore. Other poems such as "The Crossed Apple" recall the language and tone of Robert Frost:
This apple's from a tree yet unbeholden, Where two kinds meet, —
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Eat it; and you will taste more than the fruit:
The blossom, too,
The sun, the air, the darkness at the root,
The rain, the dew,
The earth we came to, and the time we flee,
The fire and the breast.
I claim the white part, maiden, that's for me.
You take the rest.
The seasons and the passage of time are the subject of several of the strongest lyrics in the book, including "Division," "Girl's Song," "Feuer-Nacht," "Fiend's Weather," and "Come, Break with Time." The lovely first stanza of "Simple Autumnal" illustrates Bogan's preoccupation:
The measured blood beats out the year's delay.
The tearless eyes and heart, forbidden grief,
Watch the burned, restless, but abiding leaf,
The brighter branches arming the bright day.
In the year following the publication of Dark Summer, the marriage between Bogan and Holden began to fail, and Bogan fell ill with severe depression. In the spring of 1931 she checked herself into New York's Neurological Institute in hopes of finding a cure. "I refused to fall apart," she wrote to Wheelock, "so I have been taken apart, like a watch." In the mood of self-reflection following her release from the hospital, she wrote the autobiographical essay "Journey Around My Room," which would become the basis of the "autobiography" edited by her friend Ruth Limmer in 1980.
In 1932 Bogan was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship "for creative writing abroad" and set sail alone for Italy in April 1933. While she was away in Italy, France, and Austria, struggling to write and often depressed, her marriage fell apart completely. When she returned home several months early to remake her life, the enterprise was not immediately successful. In November 1933 she checked herself into New York Hospital's Westchester Division, this time admitting a "bad nervous crack-up."
She stayed at the hospital for nearly seven months and returned home a good deal healthier than when she had left. She divorced her husband, gathered her good friends — Edmund Wilson and Morton Dauwen Zabel in particular — around, and set about to do her work. Though she was able to write only a few poems, she took up her critical prose with enthusiasm and began to write short stories and autobiographical prose, which she hoped to make into a novel tentatively titled "Laura Dailey's Story." An excellent prose stylist and storyteller, Bogan eventually published thirteen stories in The New Yorker, but she did not complete her novel. She gave up writing both fiction and autobiography after 1936.
The years between 1935 and 1941 or so were some of the most fulfilling in Bogan's life, despite financial troubles (she was evicted from her apartment in September 1935 and had to retrieve her possessions from the street). She continued to write critical prose and began to prepare her third book of poems, The Sleeping Fury (1937). In June 1935 she began a happy love affair with the young poet Theodore Roethke, a dozen years her junior. She wrote to Wilson of her enthusiasm:
I, myself, have been made to bloom like a Persian rose-bush, by the enormous love-making of a cross between a Brandenburger and a Pomeranian, one Theodore Roethke by name. He is very, very large (6 ft. 2 and weighing 218 lbs) and he writes very very small lyrics. 26 years old and a frightful tank. We have poured rivers of liquor down our throats, these last three days, and, in between, have indulged in such bearish and St. Bernardish antics as I have never before experienced. Well! Such goings on! A woman of my age! The affair lasted several months, and the two remained friends. Bogan had much to teach Roethke about lyric poetry, and she quickly assumed that role in his life. Several poems came to Bogan during this relationship, perhaps the last such spell of extended creativity she would experience. The new poems enabled her to publish The Sleeping Fury, which was then generally regarded as her strongest volume.
The lyrics of The Sleeping Fury reflect the hard-won wisdom of Bogan's psychological recovery as well as her renewed health and vitality. Its reviewers remarked the collection's "sparseness" but praised its integrity. Her friend Zabel noted in the 5 May 1937 New Republic the book's freedom from the fashionable ideologies of the day and defended its "old fashioned" values:
It is because they show so firmly what this depth can yield that these poems bring the finest vitality of the lyric tradition to bear on the confusions that threaten the poets who, by satire or prophecy, indignation or reform, have reacted against that tradition and cast it into contempt. Her work, instinctive with self-criticism and emotional severity, speaks with one voice only; her rewards and those of her readers have a common source in the discipline to which the clarity of her music and her unsophistic craftsmanship are a testimony. It should be a model for poets in any decade or of any ambition.
The book opens and closes with "songs" and in between contains a handful of Bogan's finest lyrics. The opening of "Roman Fountain" reflects her memories of Italy and, perhaps, some of the sexual vitality of her affair with Roethke:
Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest,
and fall.
Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.
Several poems offer advice to an imagined reader who has suffered what Bogan has. "Hence-forth, from the Mind" counsels acceptance of the diminished emotional intensity of a healthy adult life. "Exhortation" repudiates that resolution through painful irony: "Give over seeking bastard joy /Nor cast for fortune's side-long look. /Indifference can be your toy; /The bitter heart can be your book."
In her title poem, "The Sleeping Fury," Bogan looks mental torment in the face:
Your hair fallen on your cheek, no longer in the sem blance of serpents,
Lifted in the gale; your mouth, that shrieked so, silent.
You, my scourge, my sister, lie asleep, like a child,
Who, after rage, for an hour quiet, sleeps out its tears.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And now I may look upon you,
Having once met your eyes. You lie in sleep and forget me.
Alone and strong in my peace, I look upon you in yours.
"Kept" shows a mature denial of sentimentalized memories of childhood and youth:
Time for the wood, the clay,
The trumpery dolls, the toys
Now to be put away:
We are not girls and boys.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Time for the pretty clay,
Time for the straw, the wood.
The playthings of the young
Get broken in the play,
Get broken, as they should.
Bogan also looks hard at alcohol, the friend and sometime nemesis of her life. In "To Wine" she ironically exhorts the "Cup, ignorant and cruel," to
Take from the mind its loss:
The lipless dead that lie
Face upward in the earth,
Strong hand and slender thigh;
Return to the vein
All that is worth
Grief. Give that beat again.
In 1937 Bogan applied for and was granted the remainder of her Guggenheim Fellowship, which she had been unable to complete in 1932. In April she sailed for Ireland. From the start the trip was a struggle for Bogan, who was frequently depressed and anxious. In the country of her ancestors she was unable for find a place for herself, and she sailed home several weeks later in a state of near collapse. A man on the boat train to Southampton came to her rescue and cared for her throughout the voyage home. After a week of recovery Bogan, who had remarked in her notebook three years before that "There can be no new love at 37, in a woman," began a relationship with the man, an electrician from the Bronx, that would last eight years. She kept it largely a secret from her friends, but by her own account the relationship was as happy and fulfilling as any she would ever have.
In the spring of 1938 Bogan moved into the apartment on West 169th Street where she would live for the rest of her life, engaging in a lively and energetic career as a literary critic and a woman of letters, squabbling with her fellow poets and critics, and publishing many incisive and insightful reviews and essays. She championed the cause of W. H. Auden as he arrived in the United States in 1939 and did a great deal in bringing public attention to his work. But poems came to her only occasionally. She struggled to produce enough work for a new book, and Poems and New Poems included old work as well as what Bogan called her "light verse," clever occasional poems on contemporary topics. In this category is the memorable couplet titled "Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell": "At midnight tears /Run into your ears."
The group of new poems in the volume opens with "Several Voices Out of a Cloud," a sharp attack on the ideological hacks Bogan saw dominating the world of poetry. The poem is uncharacteristically contemporary, in a manner reminiscent of Auden: "Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!" she invites and concludes by naming the pretending poets:
Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless
And it isn't for you.
Other new poems have a variety of subjects: "Animal, Vegetable and Mineral" is a contemplation of the glass flowers exhibit at Harvard's Museum of Natural History; "To Be Sung on the Water" is a tender and playful love lyric; and "Zone" captures with icy accuracy the disquieting ambiguity of New England in the month of March: "Now we hear /What we heard last year, /And bear the wind's rude touch /And its ugly sound /Equally with so much /We have learned how to bear."
Bogan wrote no poems between the publication of Poems and New Poems in 1941 and 1948. The horror of World War II discouraged her about the power of poetry against such hatred, and she was troubled by what she saw as the obscurity of her own position. In hopes of finding a publisher that would promote her work more forcefully, Bogan left Scribners and Wheelock, with unfortunate results. She would not find a new publisher until 1954, and the sense of being on her own made writing poems more difficult. She once remarked to Wheelock that "A woman writes poetry with her ovaries." As she entered middle age Bogan began to feel that her time had past.
Bogan's essays and reviews did much to keep her name before the public in the war years and their wake. She began new, lasting friendships among young admirers of her work, including William Maxwell, a novelist and New Yorker staffer when he met Bogan in 1938; May Sarton, an established poet whom Bogan invited to her apartment in 1953; and Ruth Limmer, an English professor whom Bogan met in 1956 when she received an honorary doctorate from the Western College for Women (Limmer would become her literary executor). With the winding down of the war, literature could once again command attention, and Bogan began to be asked to serve on various poetry-prize juries. In 1944 she gave the Hopwood lecture at the University of Michigan. She also began to read her poems in public and accepted the position as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1945 – 1946). She was in the Library Fellows group that, amid controversy, awarded the first Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound, then incarcerated in a mental institution in Washington, D.C., having been judged incompetent to stand trial for treason at the end of the war. She accepted a teaching position at the University of Washington and went on to teach at the University of Chicago and New York University, among other places. Bogan also began her work as a translator, working with Elizabeth Mayer on works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ernst Juenger and with Elizabeth Roget on works by Jules Renard. In 1951 she published her critical study, Achievement in American Poetry, 1900 – 1950, which included an anthology with her selection of worthy poems from the period.
Bogan found a publisher in the new Noonday Press in the early 1950s and set about preparing her Collected Poems 1923 – 1953 (1954). She had only three new poems to add to the whole: "After the Persian," her contemplation of Persian art at New York's Metropolitan Museum; the light poem "Train Tune"; and, most remarkably, "Song for the Last Act." This poem is built around a refrain, varied to marvelous effect in each of its three stanzas: "Now that I have your face by heart, I look"; "Now that I have your voice by heart, I read"; "Now that I have your heart by heart, I see." The poem links desire and memory in a tone unmistakably valedictory, "O not departure, but a voyage done!" A year later Bogan published a volume of Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry (1955). Both volumes were respectfully reviewed, and she shared the 1955 Bollingen Prize with Léonie Adams.
Bogan's last years were a combination of honors, continued hard work, dark depression, and alcoholism. Between 1957 and 1964 she went annually to the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where she found the time and peace to write poems as well as critical prose. Her collection The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923 – 1968 (1968) includes a dozen new poems, most of which had been begun much earlier. Most of her last poems are in free verse, as Bogan grew more willing to accept poems in the forms in which they came to her. Notable among these last works is "The Dragonfly," written on commission from the Corning Glass Company, which had a Steuben glass dragonfly carved to illustrate it. The poem "Night" provided the title for the collection. It recalls in both setting and sound poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Bogan's somewhat younger contemporary:
The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
— O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.
The Blue Estuaries received strong reviews. William Meredith in the 13 October 1968 New York Times Book Review called Bogan "one of the best woman poets alive" and wondered at how her "reputation has lagged behind a career of stubborn, individual excellence." Hayden Carruth in the August 1969 issue of Poetry praised the poems despite their small number: "this book's best pages make it fundamentally irreducible." That assessment seems accurate; perhaps the forces or frailties that prevented Bogan from writing more afforded her marvelous control over her art.
Louise Bogan died at her apartment of a coronary occlusion on 4 February 1970. A memorial service, arranged by her friend William Jay Smith, was held at the Academy of Arts and Letters on 11 March, attended by 120 of her friends and admirers. At the service W. H. Auden noted Bogan's personal strength. "Aside from their technical excellence," he said of her poems, "what is most impressive is the unflinching courage with which she faced her problems, and her determination never to surrender to self-pity, but to wrest beauty and joy out of dark places."
Source: Brett C. Millier, "Louise Bogan," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 169, American Poets Since World War II, Fifth Series, edited by Joseph Conte, Gale, 1996, pp. 54 – 62.
Carol Shloss
In the following essay, Shloss discusses Bogan's personal struggles with her family, the passionate, often painful tones of her poetry, and her success as a writer and critic.
In 1970, at a memorial service for Louise Bogan, W.H. Auden identified what he thought to be the most enduring qualities of her lyric poetry: "aside from their technical excellence, [what] is most impressive about her poems is the unflinching courage with which she faced her problems, and her determination never to surrender to self-pity, but to wrest beauty and joy out of dark places." Auden had first met Bogan in 1941 when she was well established as a critic of poetry at the New Yorker and had already written four of the six books of verse on which her reputation as one of America's finest lyric poets was to rest. For almost thirty years, he had watched the unfolding of a talent. His appreciation of her gifts as poet, essayist, fiction writer, and autobiographer was shared by many of Bogan's friends, who also saw the violence of feeling which her work expressed and subdued through the regularities of form. Classical in their adherence to the laws of traditional poetic structure, romantic in their tendency to embrace the extremes of passionate experience, her best lyrics can stand with the work of the poets she most admired: Yeats, Rilke, and Auden. As Theodore Roethke had earlier written in honor of his friend, teacher, and mentor, "The best work will stay in the language as long as the language survives."
Bogan's journey to a place of prominence in American letters had been wrested from unpromising beginnings. Born on 11 August 1897, the daughter of Daniel Bogan, a clerk in a paper mill in Livermore Falls, Maine, and Mary Helen Murphy Shields Bogan, she was more properly destined for married life in the mill towns of New England. Her mother was a reckless, violent, and undependable woman who handled the disappointments of her marriage through numerous love affairs. The Bogan children, Louise and her brother, Charles, were raised in a succession of rooming houses and exposed to an equally consistent succession of their mother's lovers. These childhood circumstances would never leave Bogan's memory, and they account for one of the predominant emotional constellations in both her life and art: the belief that love was inextricably bound with rage, guilt, and betrayal. By the age of six or eight she had become "what I was for half my life: the semblance of a girl, in which some desires and illusions had been early assassinated: shot dead."
If her parents served as the source of Bogan's early grief, they also provided her, indirectly, with the resources for coping with that sorrow. Eventually Daniel Bogan moved his family to Boston. where Louise was given piano lessons and then sent to Girls' Latin School. She was trained in Greek and Latin, and in the classical structures of versification. These few years were almost the whole of her formal education. Although she wrote constantly (by the age of eighteen, she "had a thick pile of manuscripts in a drawer in the dining room"), she chose not to pursue a full college career. After one year at Boston University (1915 – 1916), she abandoned plans to go on to Radcliffe in favor of marriage, on 4 September 1916, to a young soldier of German origin, Curt Alexander. In part she married as an escape from the domestic traumas of her parents' household, but she proved to be more of her mother's child than she could comfortably admit; for in later years, she reenacted the cycle of lust and betrayal that she so regretted in her parent. It was as if she were drawn to recapitulate her position as a helpless, violated child until, with the help of psychoanalysis, she broke through the cycle of damage to a superior awareness.
Nowhere does her poetry discuss these painful experiences; nonetheless they underlie and explain the dynamics of many of her early lyrics. Later in life, she was able to formulate a theory about the relationship between poetry and the experiences in life which empower it: in Journey Around My Room (1980) she said, "The poet represses the out-right narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself. The repressed becomes the poem. Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there." Yet initially, in her poetry and in her life, she sought passion for its own sake and was dismayed when it offered her so little that she wanted.
On 19 October 1917 Mathilde (Maidie), her only child, was born; several months later, two of her first poems were published in Others, a little magazine edited by Alfred Kreymborg in New York City. By May 1918 she had left Alexander at his station in Panama and returned to the home of her parents. This, too, was a temporary move, a prelude to a life of uncommon transience in which moving represented or expressed an underlying restlessness of spirit. Years later, her emotions governed by a hard-won and mature perspective, she wondered if she had eradicated the deepest sources of her own creativity in the course of mastering her otherwise self-destructive conflicts. To Morton Zabel she wrote in December 1935, "I don't recommend to you, this calm I have reached. It may be spiritual death or spiritual narcosis." But in the midst of young adulthood, she did not pause to analyze. She was pulled toward New York City, where she hoped to find a context for herself among the bohemians of Greenwich Village.
New York in 1919 did, in fact, nurture her talent and provide her with the friends who remained closest to her in later life: William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Maxwell Bodenheim, Edmund Wilson, Léonie Adams, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Rolf Humphries were among her earliest acquaintances. Leaving Maidie with her parents, she found a lover; she worked and wrote. In 1920 she learned of Curt Alexander's death. Whatever remorse she may have felt about their broken relationship and the temporary abandonment of their child was seasoned with the rewards of poetic achievement. By 1921 Harriet Weaver had published five of her poems in Poetry; by 1923 Bogan had found a publisher for her first book of verse. Robert M. McBride and Company brought out Body of This Death.
The title of the book is taken from Rom. 7:24: "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Its themes are those that would absorb her for her entire career: the betrayal of beauty by the flesh, the antipathy between passion and wisdom, the tension between time and the "crystal clasp" of art. Strongly influenced by Yeats, Bogan found highly personal and deeply feminine ways to express the yearning for transcendence which must succumb to the limitations of time and human error. "Knowledge" can stand as an example of themes whose variations are worked out by "A Tale," "Medusa," "A Letter," "Sonnet," and the other poems of this collection: "Now that I know /Now passion warms little /Of flesh in the mould, /And treasure is brittle, — I'll lie here and learn /How, over their ground, /Trees make a long shadow /And a light sound."
When Robert Frost read "A Tale," the opening poem of Body of This Death, he remarked, "That woman will be able to do anything." Other critics shared his appreciation of Bogan's technical mastery and commented on the intensity, fierceness, and pride which seemed to motivate the writing. But not everyone was as discerning or generous. Often reviewers were puzzled, finding the language "only obscurely significant" (Dial). The worst review came from John Gould Fletcher, who considered the book to have "an emptiness of thought that is positively painful" (Freeman).
Bogan took what she could from both praise and blame. Her allegiance to the life of letters was too deeply ingrained to let adverse reactions dis-courage her. Among those whose opinions she valued, the book's publication established her as a serious new talent. She would continue to write and to grow closer to Wilson and Humphries and the small group of writers who published in the Measure the New Republic, and the Nation.
In 1924 she met Raymond Peckham Holden, the son of a wealthy New York family, a man who aspired to the life of poet and novelist, and who later became the managing editor of the New Yorker. On 10 July 1925 they were married; and after living briefly in Boston, New York, and Santa Fe, they bought a farmhouse in Hillsdale, New York. This house became for Bogan the place of harmony and abundance which her own childhood had denied her. Here she cooked, gardened, raised her child, and learned to see the patterns of nature which life in the city had rendered obscure. Here, too, she wrote most of the lyrics for Dark Summer (1929), sending them, finally, to Edmund Wilson for criticism and advice about publication.
By recommending that she forward a copy of Body of This Death to Charles Scribner's Sons, Wilson initiated the strongest and most enduring publishing relationship of Bogan's career. Maxwell Perkins was favorably impressed with her work and John Hall Wheelock even more so. He offered Bogan a contract, asked for more work, and eventually published her next three volumes of poetry.
With these prospects before her, Bogan settled into one of the still, certain interludes of her life. Domestic order mirrored a psychic order that was all too rare in her experience of intimate relationships. It was precisely the fragility of this balanced, pastoral life that made its subsequent destruction so grim. After Christmas 1929, the Holdens returned to Hillsdale only to see their house on fire, manuscripts and notebooks — indeed all their possessions — destroyed in the blaze. Posed as she was between desire and rage, Bogan could not help but read the fire emblematically; and in fact, the equanimity of her marriage seems to have dissipated along with her more tangible belongings. Although Dark Summer had come out the previous September, the pleasure of its publication could not offset another kind of interior disintegration.
The middle period of Bogan's creative life is marked by a dichotomy between the increasing solidity of her reputation as a poet and the seeming vulnerability of her emotions. Even as she received the accolades of critics, she lapsed into a deepening depression. In public life, Yvor Winters reviewed Dark Summer, singling out "Come, Break with Time" and "Simple Autumnal" for special praise. They could, he said, stand "with the best songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whether one selects examples from Campion, Jonson, or Dryden." From a much later vantage point, Elizabeth Frank named "Simple Autumnal" "one of the great lyrics in American poetry." She saw it as the effort of a writer to ally herself with the seasonal cycles of ripening and decay that Bogan's earlier poetry had tried to escape. Like Hart Crane's "Voyages," it is a song of reconciliation and acceptance, which moves toward integration of the personal and natural worlds. "Summer Wish" is even more accomplished and brings Bogan's work into the company of Yeats's "The Tower" and Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning." It is a meditative eclogue, a dialogue in which two voices confront the problem of despair. Although the second voice overwhelms the first, offering it a vision of stasis ("See now /Open above the field, stilled in wingstiffened flight, /The stretched hawk fly"), Bogan, in private life, was less and less able to find those quiet moments.
In April 1931 she submitted herself for a rest cure at the Neurological Institute in Manhattan. Once again, her private struggle was carried on amid an otherwise flourishing career. In 1933 when she was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation grant for travel in Europe, Bogan seized the opportunity, for she sensed that distance and change would grant her a perspective valuable both to her craft and to her domestic situation. In the first goal, she succeeded, but her marital problems were not so easily resolved. Very shortly after she returned from Europe, she once again admitted herself to a hospital for rest and personal reflection. By 1935, when she divorced Raymond Holden, the period of greatest turbulence in Bogan's life was over.
It is probably not fortuitous that the 1930s were also the time of Bogan's greatest achievements in prose writing. The self-reflection required by psychoanalysis may have spurred her autobiographical trilogy: "Journey Around My Room" (New Yorker, 1932), "Dove and Serpent" (New Yorker, 1933), and "Letdown" (New Yorker, 1934). All of these pieces constitute Bogan's inquiry into those steps that "started me toward this point, as opposed to all other points on the habitable globe." Her New Yorker stories, influenced by Viola Meynell, Ivan Turgenev, and Anton Chekhov, often seemed to work through the issues that were most pressing in her actual experience — the destructiveness of romantic attachment, the need for private sources of strength and grace.
This belief in the value of turning inward can also explain Bogan's resistance to the social movements of the 1930s. She placed her faith in the lessons of psychoanalysis and in individual responses to fate; she gave no credence to solutions posed in terms of collective destiny. If one were "to lift the material world to the ideal," she said (New Republic, 1936), "it would be just as well to clear up the ideal, to know the human springs that feed it." Freud, with his discovery of the unconscious, was more important to her than Marx, with his belief in economic determinism; and as the 1930s passed, and as more and more of her intimate friends — Rolf Humphries, Léonie Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edmund Wilson — came to sympathize with the Communist cause, Bogan found herself increasingly isolated.
To Rolf Humphries and Edmund Wilson she proposed a political truce, since she needed their help in preparing her next book of poems. The Sleeping Fury, once again published by Scribners, appeared in 1937. The title of the book is also the name of a relief sculpture Bogan had seen in Rome at the Museo Nazionale delle Terme, "L'Erinni Addormentata"; and to some extent, this image of rage and grief, exhausted and given over to sleep, informs the entire collection of poems. Where Bogan's first two books had shown the influence of Yeats, The Sleeping Fury showed most clearly the influence of Rilke, whom she had been reading avidly for several years. When she had needed a language for anger, indignation, and bitter disappointment, Yeats's high blown rhetoric had been an adequate guide; now that she sought to transcend suffering and to express emotional equanimity, the German poet served her better. The most beautiful lyrics in this collection, "Henceforth from the Mind," "The Sleeping Fury," and "Song for a Lyre," have the quiet authority of a poet in full command of her art.
The Sleeping Fury was essentially Bogan's last full book of original verse; the books that followed it were collections of previously published works with new poems added to them. Poems and New Poems, which came out in 1941, was the last book Bogan published with Scribners before her break with John Hall Wheelock. Collected Poems, 1923 – 1953 was brought out by Cecil Hemley of Noonday Press in 1954. The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923 – 1968 which Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published in 1968, served as a summary of her poetic achievement as it stretched from youth to age.
Although the years after 1937 were years of declining productivity, they were years when Bogan consolidated her reputation and reaped the fruits of an earlier devotion to letters. Others were anxious to know her opinions. If it was as a poet that Bogan made her reputation, it was as a critic that she made her living. Her work for the New Yorker continued until shortly before her death. Twice a year she provided the magazine with omnibus reviews of the most interesting poetry of the previous months, and she wrote countless brief notices. On her resignation from the magazine in 1969, William Shawn, then editor in chief, wrote, "for thirty-eight years we have been in the extraordinary position of knowing beyond all question that no other magazine's reviewing of poetry was as perceptive or trustworthy or intelligent as our own."
Awards and requests for readings, talks, and teaching posts started coming in the 1940s. In 1944 she became a Fellow in American Letters at the Library of Congress; in the same year, she gave the Hopwood Lecture at the University of Michigan. In 1945 she went to Washington, D.C., as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. The year 1948 was filled with invitations to universities, and though she remained acutely aware of her own lack of formal education and convinced that the academy had slighted her, a catalogue of her activities in this one year alone belies her own assessment: she went to a poetry conference at Sarah Lawrence College, gave a reading at the New School for Social Research with Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, and Allen Tate, taught summer school at the University of Washington, and spoke at Bard "On the Pleasures of Formal Verse."
In 1951 she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1954 she was elected to the Academy of American Poets. In 1955 she shared the Bollingen Prize for poetry with Léonie Adams. In 1957 she was invited to the MacDowell Colony, and in the following year she participated in the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. An award from the Academy of American Poets came in 1959, and she received the Creative Arts award from Brandeis University in 1962. In 1969, a year before her death, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. On the more personal level, she had sustained the lifelong friendships of people she respected and had found room, at an age when other lives are often narrowing in scope, to admit new intimacies: William Maxwell, the new poetry editor for the New Yorker; Elizabeth Mayer, a German translator; and May Sarton, a younger writer and poet, are several examples.
Bogan's final years were lived in a kind of secular monasticism. Weaned from the destructive passions that had governed her youth, she lived alone and with the dignity of a hard-won victory over private terrors. To her lifelong friend, Morton Zabel, she wrote, "It is as though I had, after thirty years, really come into my whole being. I can feel rage, but I am never humiliated, any more, and I am never lonely." Despite her brave words, her struggle was never simple and success never to be assumed. She could relapse into depressions until the end of her life. But she had, on the whole, found admission to the "temperate threshold" so avidly sought in and through her verse.
Poetry, to Bogan, was wrought from "rhythm as we first experience it within the heartbeat, pulse and breath." Certainly, in her own case, it was an extension of self so vital that its excision would have left her vulnerable to inner demons and, as Stanley Kunitz put it, to "the deep night swarming with images of reproach and desire." But language did not fail her nor she it; and in her devotion to poetry she found forgiveness and personal reconciliation. To others she gave some of the most austere, searing, and beautiful lyrics written in America in this century.
Louise Bogan died on Wednesday, 4 February 1970. At her memorial service, Richard Wilbur, who spoke along with Auden, observed that "she remained faithful to the theme of passion." William Meredith, writing during her lifetime, was more encompassing in his praise: Louise Bogan was "one of the best women poets alive."
Source: Carol Shloss, "Louise Bogan," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 45, American Poets, 1880 – 1945, First Series, edited by Peter Quartermain, Gale, 1986, pp. 52 – 59.
What Do I Read Next?
- Collected Poems, 1923 – 1954 (1954), by Louise Bogan, is a collection of her early poems. Also included are three poems written after World War II ended. Bogan was awarded the 1955 Bollingen Prize for this collection.
- The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923 – 1968 (1968) was Bogan's final work of poetry. This collection earned Bogan the best reviews she ever received for a book of poetry.
- The Metaphysical Poets (1960, 3d ed.), edited by Helen Gardner, provides a good introduction that helps explain the characteristics of metaphysical poetry. The collection of poetry included provides a selection of poets, over many years.
- The Poetry of John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets, reissued in 1989 and edited by Joseph E. Grennen, includes a comprehensive selection of Donne's work. Donne is considered the most important of the metaphysical poets, and he had an influence on Bogan's poetry.
- Sleeping on the Wing: An Anthology of Modern Poetry with Essays on Reading and Writing (1982), by Kate Farrell and Kenneth Koch, is a collection of poetry selected from among twenty-three modern poets. In addition to a collection of wonderful poems, the authors also provide guides to help fledgling writers create their own poems.
- Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (1996, 2d ed.), by Harvey Seymour and Robert McDowell, is a good basic text to help the student understand form and function in modern poetry. One strength of this book is its emphasis on metrical structure and stanza forms.
