There was a time, not so long ago, when the terms “poet” and “critic” weren’t mutually exclusive, and the New Yorker had a poetry reviewer on staff; her name was Louise Bogan, and she held the post for thirty-eight years, retiring in 1969 just months before her death. This book, splendidly edited and introduced by Mary Kinzie, is a selection of Bogan’s short fiction, autobiographical writing, letters, and criticism, as well as some uncollected and unpublished poems. It reveals a writer of wit, eloquence, and masterful self-control. All the writing here—from the learned reviews to the letters with their gems of scandalous repartee—is informed by the unflinching insight of a female artist who utterly suffered, savored, and defied her lot in life. While Bogan once deprecated her own gift, saying that it “depended on the flash—on the aperçu,” the shorts collected here make it clear that her individual works were very ambitious in their depth if not their length.

Bogan was born into a poor, volatile, Irish-Catholic family at the turn of the century, and A Poet’s Prose, insomuch as it documents her inner life, reads like a long, exacting campaign against the untamable nerves and romantic excesses that were her only inheritance. She detested self-pity. The incidents of “turmoil in a disastrous childhood,” she wrote, “...are so vivid and so terrible that to remember them is inadequate: they must be forgotten.” Nevertheless, Bogan was haunted by both painful and tender memories of her mother, a proud, vain, irresponsible woman who sent her off to boarding school at the age of eight. It’s no surprise that stoicism became the ethic that governed her style, which is often mercilessly direct.

There is something muscular, even mannish about Bogan’s prose, yet she was committed to a feminine ideal. In The Heart and the Lyre, a review of female American poets, she disapproved of the “imitation of certain masculine 'trends’ in contemporary poetry.” “The intensity of [women’s] emotions is the key to the treasures of their spirit,” she wrote, asserting “the great importance of keeping the emotional channels of a literature open.” But she hated the image of the swooning poetess, and urged women instead toward a “perfect and poignant song.” Her own poems often feel parched: neat crops that have been burnt in order to get rid of some lush infestation. We get the sense that Bogan went to formal poetry as a means of containing feeling; she knew that over-dramatizing her suffering would have diminished the tragic experience that had led to it. Yet, in all of her work, there remains a sort of adamant vulnerability, a refusal to harden into complaint, to close herself off behind a set of elaborate defenses. Late in life, she wrote, “The poems depended upon the ability to love. (Yeats kept saying this, to the end.) The faculty of loving. A talent. A gift.”

Bogan’s lyrics are more remarkable in light of the fact that, while crafting them, she was establishing herself as a bold poet-critic. Her criticism is clear, brilliant, and often impertinent, even when writing about the poets she most admires. Of Pound’s Cantos LII-LXXI she quipped, “A photograph of Pound, making him look even more scowling than he frequently sounds, embellishes its cover.” Of Marianne Moore: “She does not resemble certain seventeenth-century writers; she might be one of them.” Of Auden: “A stuffy state of mind and a bigwig style will stifle a poem about sharecroppers as quickly as a poem about peacocks in the twilight.”

Bogan’s correspondence rollicks with confidence and censures with impunity. Many of the letters Kinzie has selected are addressed to literary heavyweights like Edmund Wilson, Theodore Roethke, and Allen Tate, who were among Bogan’s closest friends—and sometimes more than friends. “I, myself, have been made to bloom like a Persian rosebush, by the enormous love-making of a cross between a Brandenburger and a Pomeranian, one Theodore Roethke by name,” she wrote to Wilson. And, in a letter to Tate, defending her negative review of his Poems 1928-1931: “In short, these poems struck me as elaborate ruses, as poetic sophistry (in the non-Protagorean sense of the term.)” She had no problem hanging with the boys. Beneath even her sharpest zingers, however, there is a generosity of spirit—a sense of responsibility—that keeps them from being petty or cruel. She managed to remain friends with Roethke and Tate throughout her life, she reserved a good deal of equanimity for her ex-husband, and she even found praise for her mother in the end.

Throughout her career, Bogan was plagued by paranoia and doubt about her accomplishments. Twice she suffered nervous breakdowns that caused her to be hospitalized. In a snippet from 1936 she wrote, “Saw my real, half-withered, silly face in a shop mirror on the street, under the bald light of an evening shower, and shuddered. The woman who died without producing an oeuvre.” Perhaps her self-recriminations weren’t entirely irrational; in reading A Poet’s Prose, one is struck by a forcefulness of character that rarely comes across in the poems. In Bogan’s lyrics, as stirring and beautiful as they can be, we’re often moved more by the enormity of what’s being held back than by what’s actually on the page. We have to wonder if this woman who had established herself as a public figure, a critic of fierce intelligence, and a gifted lyricist suffered the “mistaken self-consciousness” that she warned other female poets against, and if she therefore restrained a voice that, unleashed, would have proven itself overwhelmingly feminine. On the other hand, as a self-styled “minor poet” and critic, Bogan took on a role that men have filled comfortably for centuries, and produced a compelling, durable body of work. Regardless of whether or not we consider it an oeuvre, her work should remain of much interest to us—especially to young, female poets who shudder at the term “poetess” and who find a dearth of examples on which to model their careers.

— Danielle Chapman