In her first collection, Bogan epitomized the faults of her sex in "Women" (1923), a stiff, pinched accusation devoid of sympathy. Composed in five quatrains rhyming abcb, the work belies the speaker, who advises her sex to suppress the feminine passions that bind them to diminished expectations. Sharp jabs strike out in nine lines beginning with "they" and a verb, each characterizing some flaw or fault. As though dissociating herself from membership in womanhood, she belittles women for circumscribing their lives and for reining in curiosity and emotion. Through misjudgment and limited horizons, they invest too much of self in "every whisper that speaks to them." Parallel to a lack of "wilderness" in the opening line, in the conclusion she disparages the self-defeat of far-ranging altruism and counsels women to "let . . . go by."
In 1941, Bogan published "Evening in the Sanitarium," which contained a more flowing line and generous compassion than she employed in "Women." The title introduces an elegy on desolation, the sunset of hope for institutionalized women. Dour and dispirited, the gentle voice quells belief that inmates can achieve a complete cure. Against their "half-healed hearts" batter insuperable odds — a return to childbirth, rejection, and the monotony of middle-class domesticity, which she characterizes as "[meeting] forever Jim home on the 5:35."
