Bogan's work suffered from disruptions, first by a fire in 1929, which destroyed her manuscripts, then by loss of Holden's inheritance in the stock market crash, and finally by depression, which required hospitalization at the New York Neurological Institute. Illness and her pathologic jealousy ended her second marriage. Vivid self-revelation energizes The Sleeping Fury (1937), published the year she was divorced. She followed with Poems and New Poems (1941) and two works of criticism: the highly successful Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950 (1951) and Selected Criticism: Poetry and Prose (1955). Her Collected Poems (1954) won the Bollingen Prize.
Bogan's accomplishments include a $10,000 National Endowment for the Arts award; publication of her entire canon in The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968 (1968), and her election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which honored her most enduring verse. In 1964, she published The Journal of Jules Renard, co-translated by Elizabeth Roget. After a fatal heart attack in her New York apartment on February 4, 1970, a posthumous collection, A Poet's Alphabet (1970), amassed her critical reviews of the influential poets of the age. It was followed by three more posthumous publications: a translation of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther; Novella (1971), collected letters to female friends in What the Woman Lived (1973); and a painfully honest, witty autobiography, Journey Around My Room (1980).
