Bogan, Louise (1897 - 1970)

Genre: Poetry

Louise Bogan was born on Aug. 11, 1897 in Livermore Falls; her paternal grandfather was a sea captain out of Portland Harbor. She was raised in Milton, NH, and Ballardvale, MA and she lived most of her adult life in New York City. She was widowed after four years of marriage in 1920; her second marriage was to poet Raymond Holden, lasting from 1925 until their divorce in 1937.

Bogan was poetry editor and critic for The New Yorker from 1931 to 1970. She won the Bollingen Prize in 1955 for her poetry and held the Library of Congress Chair in Poetry from 1945-1946.

Selected Bibliography

  • Body of This Death (1923)
  • Dark Summer (1929)
  • The Sleeping Fury (1937)
  • Poems & New Poems (1941)
  • Achievement in American Poetry 1900-1950 (1951)
  • Collected Poems 1923-1953 (1954)
  • Selected Criticism: Prose, poetry (1955)
  • The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (1968)
  • A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art & Vocation (1970)
  • The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People (1965) editor.
  • Elective Affinities poetry of Goethe, (1963) translator
  • The Glass Bees poetry of Ernst Junger, (1960) translator.
  • What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan 1920-1970 (1973)
  • Journey Around My Room, 1981), a posthumous autobiography

Selected Resources