Louise Bogan - Biography and Works

Bogan (1897-1970) an American writer was educated at Boston University. She was the regular poetry reviewer for The New Yorker from 1931 to 1968, and in 1951 published the highly regarded Achievement in American Poetry 1900-1951.

Her own poetry was strongly influenced by her study of the 16th and 17th century English verse, and is characterized by its dramatic structure and highly refined metrical forms. She published six volumes of poems: Body of the Death (1923), Dark Summer (1929), The Sleeping Fury (1937), Poems and New Poems (1941), Collected Poems 1923-1953 (1954), and The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923 – 1968 (1968). A prose collection, A Poet’s Alphabet, appeared in 1970, and her autobiography, Journey Around My Room, in 1980.

Louise Bogan’s poem, 'Medusa', with its classical allusion is a shaping forth of the unconscious into an endurable form. However, it does not necessarily become more pleasing for that enduring quality of art.