The American critic and poet, Louise Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine in 1897. Her father was a factory clerk, then a foreman. That is the reason why Bogan’s family used to move around New England when she was still a child.

The conditions, under which Louise and her brother were growing up, were not the most desirable. Their parents quarreled violently and their mother’s numerous love affairs and occasional long absences from home caused many problems at Begon’s mental health during the years that followed.

She had the chance to attend the Girls’ Latin School for five years. During that period, she made her debut at poetry. In 1915, she began college at Boston University but the next year (1916), she met Curt Alexander, a soldier in U.S.Army; she abandoned her studies; they got married and had one daughter. But, the couple broke up two years later and Curt died in 1920.

After her ex-husband’s death, Bogan travelled in Vienna alone, in search of her new identity. Then, she settled in New York’s Greenwich Village section and there she published her first book of poetry, Body of This Death: Poems in1923. The same year, she met the poet and novelist Raymond Holden. The two got married in 1925 but this second marriage, also, had bad ending (they got divorced in 1937). During their marriage, Louise published her second book of poetry, Dark Summer: Poems (1929) and was hired as a poetry editor for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years.

These were the most productive poetic years for Louise Bogan. In 1937, her third volume The Sleeping Fury, was brought out. Moreover, she wrote two lengthy surveys – fall and spring- titled “The Season’s Verse” for the New Yorkers, along with numerous essays for other magazines and newspapers. Her prose was direct, nonacademic and sharp. The series of articles on her two favorite poets, William Butler Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, were particularly insightful. As the strain of writing poetry increased, Bogan turned more and more to education and criticism. In 1951, she was also asked to write a short story of American Poetry which was published as Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950. Louise translated poetry and prose and collaborated with younger writers.

In the 1940’s, Bogan began to give lectures, to consult and to teach, activities that she continued into the 1950’s and 60’s. she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The “Collected Poems: 1923-1953” won the Bollinger award in 1955.

As mentioned above, in her lifetime, Louise faced a mental illness that led her in a psychiatric hospital in 1931 and again in 1933. She was diagnosed with depression marked by obsessive and paranoid inclinations. She, finally, died alone in her apartment in New York in 1970.

During her lifetime, she met and was influenced by many writers and poets. The most important were William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke and W. H. Auden. Although she had many close friends among woman poets, Bogan believed that women writers were judged by lower critical standards than men and therefore they lacked the spur to produce great poetry. She even refused to review women poets in her early career and stated, “I have found from bitter experience that one woman poet is at a disadvantage in reviewing another, if the review be not laudatory”, she stated. Although Louise was flexible and perceptive as a critic, severity was the hallmark of Bogan’s approach to her own work. Her respect for literature was almost a religious calling. She wrote formal lyrics of extreme compression, with rigorous stanzaic pattern. Throughout her career, she maintained the same kind of lyric as, according to her, it was the most difficult to write.

It is also remarkable to say that Bogan had a specific aspect for the relation between politics and poetry. She resisted the 1930’s call for political poetry, when many of her writer friends turned to the left. She fought for literary purity. She strongly believed that poetry had to be something grander and more honest. She herself said to a friend: “I still think that poetry has something to do with imagination; I still think it ought to be well- written. I still think it is private feeling; not public speech”.