Acclaimed as reviewer, autobiographer, and poet, Louise Bogan earned a place among the female voices of the mid-twentieth century. As a distinct loner living in a clannish New York circle, she produced an idiosyncratic style marked by epigram, dreamy landscapes, terse phrasing, and incisive images of sexual betrayal and patriarchal constraints on women. Of her 105 published titles, the majority are brief, but pungent and darkly truth-laden. She was much admired by Ford Madox Ford and Allen Tate. Her accomplished lyrics, conflicted subjects, and powerful physicality anticipated the themes and subjects of May Sarton and Sylvia Plath.
Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, on August 11, 1897. She attended Mount St. Mary's Academy before entering Boston's Girls' Latin School. In her mid-teens, she turned from fantasies of the operatic stage to poetry, which she published in the school journal, The Jabberwork, and in the Boston Evening Transcript. She patterned her writings after the late Victorians Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, as well as the works of William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
