cover image A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan

A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan

Louise Bogan, . . Ohio Univ./Swallow, $49.95 (394pp) ISBN 978-0-8040-1071-9

Louise Bogan (1897–1970), the poet and longtime poetry reviewer for the New Yorker , was a formidable critic, particularly of her contemporaries. In this intelligently organized volume, poet and critic Kinzie (who founded the undergraduate creative writing program at Northwestern) includes Bogan's previously uncollected short fiction; extracts from her journals recollecting a grim New England mill-town childhood, letters to lifelong friends and colleagues, and Bogan's critical essays. The fifth and last section contains uncollected poems. Self-aware, self-berating and perpetually anxious about her poetic output, Bogan has a sharp and at times neurotic mind fully on display. Her letters reveal the warm intellectual friendships that sustained her—notably with Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate and lover and friend Theodore Roethke—but her critical essays are the volume's highlight, composed in an unmistakably personalized, flowing and penetrating critical voice. Here Bogan applauds the wit and liveliness of rising star W.H. Auden, endorses the lesser-known novels of Henry James, shrewdly dismisses an Elizabeth Bowen novel and writes absorbingly on contemporary literary giants Yeats, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Joyce and Pound. The poems, unsatisfying in their own right, are of scholarly interest to students focusing on Bogan's emerging lyric voice. (June)