https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Bogan
Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897 – February 4, 1970) was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945.

As poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine for nearly 40 years, Bogan played a major role in shaping mainstream poetic sensibilities of the mid-20th Century.

The Poetry Foundation notes that Bogan has been called by some critics the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century. It further notes that, "Some critics have placed her in a category of brilliant minor poets described as the "reactionary generation." This group eschewed the prevailing Modernist forms that would come to dominate the literary landscape of the era in favor of more traditional techniques.

Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier named Bogan "one of the finest lyric poets America has produced," and added that "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."


Biography
Early years

Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, where her father, Daniel Bogan, worked for various paper mills and bottling factories. She spent most of her childhood years with her parents and brother growing up in mill towns in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, where she and her family lived in working-class hotels and boardinghouses until 1904.

With the help of a female benefactor, Bogan was able to attend the Girls' Latin School for five years, which eventually gave her the opportunity to attend Boston University. In 1916, after only completing her freshman year and giving up a fellowship to Radcliffe, she left the university to marry Curt Alexander, a corporal in the U.S. Army, but their marriage ended in 1918. Bogan moved to New York to pursue a career in writing, and their only daughter, Maidie Alexander, was left in the care of Bogan's parents. After her first husband's death in 1920, she left and spent a few years in Vienna, where she explored her loneliness and her new identity in verse. She returned to New York City and published her first book of poetry, Body of This Death: Poems, in 1923, meeting that year the poet and novelist Raymond Holden. They were married by 1925. Four years later, she published her second book of poetry, Dark Summer: Poems, and shortly after was hired as a poetry editor for The New Yorker. She was divorced from Holden in 1937.
Career

Bogan's poetic style was unlike that of Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot. Suzanne Clark, an English professor from the University of Oregon, stated that Bogan often refers to her female speakers as "the locus of intemperate, dangerous, antisocial desires." This coincides with the notion that Bogan brought a different perspective to the traditional viewpoint of women.

Not only was it difficult being a female poet in the 1930s and 1940s, but her lower-middle-class Irish background and limited education also brought on much ambivalence and contradiction for Louise Bogan. She even refused to review women poets in her early career and stated, "I have found from bitter experience that one woman poet is at a disadvantage in reviewing another, if the review be not laudatory." Bogan did not discuss intimate details of her life (and disdained such confessional poets as Robert Lowell and John Berryman).

Most of her work was published before 1938. This includes Body of This Death (1923), Dark Summer (1929), and The Sleeping Fury (1937). She also translated works by Ernst Jünger, Goethe, and Jules Renard. Later in Bogan's life, a volume of her collected works, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968, was published with such poems as "The Dream" and "Women."

In late 1969, shortly before her death, she ended her 38-year career as a reviewer for The New Yorker, stating: "No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square."

One of her admirers was W. H. Auden.[citation needed]

Her poetry was published in The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Scribner's, and Atlantic Monthly. Her Collected Poems: 1923–1953 won her the Bollingen award in 1955 as well as an award from the Academy of American Poets in 1959, and she was the poetry reviewer of The New Yorker from 1931 until 1969, when she retired. She was a strong supporter, as well as a friend, of the poet Theodore Roethke.

In a letter to Edmund Wilson, she detailed a raucous affair that she and the yet-unpublished Roethke carried on in 1935, during the time between his expulsion from Lafayette College and his return to Michigan. At the time she seemed little impressed by what she called his "very, very small lyrics"; she seems to have viewed the affair as, at most, a possible source for her own work (see What the Woman Lived: Collected letters of Louise Bogan).

On February 4, 1970, Louise Bogan died of a heart attack in New York City. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds some of her papers.

A number of autobiographical pieces were published posthumously in Journey around My Room (1980). Elizabeth Frank's biography of Louise Bogan, Louise Bogan: A Portrait, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Ruth Anderson's sound poem I Come Out of Your Sleep (revised and recorded on Sinopah 1997 XI) is constructed from speech sounds in Bogan's poem "Little Lobelia."

"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!" – Louise Bogan

In 1923, Louise Bogan released her first volume of poetry, Body of this Death, containing her poem "Medusa". Though open to interpretation, "Medusa" is a poem that revolves around the petrification of the speaker who contemplates the concept of time. In the poem, after the speaker bears witness to the apparition of the Gorgon Medusa, the speaker ponders on how nature and life will continue, as "the water will always fall, and will not fall" and "the grass will always be growing for hay" while "I shall stand here like a shadow" and "nothing will ever stir". While many interpretations of the poem exist, one possible explanation for the bleakness of this poem may revolve around Bogan’s depression and solitude after divorcing from her first husband and living in poverty with a daughter in hand.[1] The idea that one would become petrified and lost in time by Medusa is similar to a feeling of loss and despair as one feels helpless and stuck in a situation where one feels their situation is unchangeable. Brett C. Millier, a Professor of Literature at Middlebury College, describes Bogan’s poetry as one where "Betrayal, particularly sexual betrayal, is a constant theme."[2] At a time where she most likely felt betrayed by her husband and society, Bogan feels like the speaker in "Medusa", stuck in a dead scene where her eyes could no longer drift away to a better life.
Personal life

Bogan married twice. In 1916 she married a soldier, Curt Alexander, and had one daughter, but the couple separated before Alexander's death in 1920. She was married to poet Raymond Holden from July 10, 1925 to 1937.

Despite the hardships Bogan encountered during the 1920s and '30s, she was able to experience the fascinations of Renaissance painting, sculpture, and ornament.


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http://www.poemhunter.com/louise-bogan/poems/
Louise Bogan Poems
1. Zone 4/15/2010
2. To Be Sung On The Water 10/24/2013
3. Statue And Birds 4/15/2010
4. Cassandra 4/15/2010
5. Words For Departure 1/13/2003
6. Leave-Taking 4/15/2010
7. Solitary Observation Brought Back From A Sojourn In Hell 1/3/2003
8. Chanson Un Peu Naïve 1/13/2003
9. Portrait 1/3/2003
10. A Tale 1/3/2003
11. Betrothed 1/13/2003
12. Sonnet 1/13/2003
13. Juan's Song 1/13/2003
14. The Frightened Man 1/13/2003
15. Women 1/3/2003
16. Epitaph For A Romantic Woman 1/3/2003
17. Man Alone 1/13/2003
18. Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom 1/3/2003
19. Knowledge 1/13/2003
20. Tears In Sleep 1/3/2003
21. The Alchemist 1/3/2003
22. Last Hill In A Vista 1/3/2003
23. To A Dead Lover 4/15/2010
24. Medusa 1/3/2003
25. The Crossed Apple 1/3/2003
26. Roman Fountain 1/13/2003
27. Song For The Last Act 1/13/2003
28. The Dream 1/3/2003

Sonnet

Since you would claim the sources of my thought
Recall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,
The reedy traps which other hands have times
To close upon it. Conjure up the hot
Blaze that it cleared so cleanly, or the snow
Devised to strike it down. It will be free.
Whatever nets draw in to prison me
At length your eyes must turn to watch it go.

My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,
My body hear no echo save its own,
Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud,
Seek out the storm, escape the bitter spell
That we obey, strain to the wind, be thrown
Straight to its freedom in the thunderous cloud
Louise Bogan

Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom

Men loved wholly beyond wisdom
Have the staff without the banner.
Like a fire in a dry thicket
Rising within women's eyes
Is the love men must return.
Heart, so subtle now, and trembling,
What a marvel to be wise.,
To love never in this manner!
To be quiet in the fern
Like a thing gone dead and still,
Listening to the prisoned cricket
Shake its terrible dissembling
Music in the granite hill.

To A Dead Lover

The dark is thrown
Back from the brightness, like hair
Cast over a shoulder.
I am alone,

Four years older;
Like the chairs and the walls
Which I once watched brighten
With you beside me. I was to waken
Never like this, whatever came or was taken.

The stalk grows, the year beats on the wind.
Apples come, and the month for their fall.
The bark spreads, the roots tighten.
Though today be the last
Or tomorrow all,
You will not mind.

That I may not remember
Does not matter.
I shall not be with you again.
What we knew, even now
Must scatter
And be ruined, and blow
Like dust in the rain.

You have been dead a long season
And have less than desire
Who were lover with lover;
And I have life—that old reason
To wait for what comes,
To leave what is over.



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http://www.thehypertexts.com/Best%20...All%20Time.htm

Louise Bogan is one of the best unknown or under-known poets of all time. Her best poems make her a major poet, in my opinion. She's a poet who deserves to be read and studied. In particular, her "After the Persian," "Juan's Song" and "Song for the Last Act" are "must reads."

Song For The Last Act
by Louise Bogan

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

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