Louise Bogan
She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945.
As poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine for nearly 40 years, Bogan played a major role in shaping mainstream poetic sensibilities of the mid-20th Century.
The Poetry Foundation notes that Bogan has been called by some critics the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century. It further notes that, "Some critics have placed her in a category of brilliant minor poets described as the "reactionary generation." This group eschewed the prevailing Modernist forms that would come to dominate the literary landscape of the era in favor of more traditional techniques.
Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier named Bogan "one of the finest lyric poets America has produced," and added that "the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending."
Elizabeth Frank's biography of Louise Bogan, Louise Bogan: A Portrait, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986.
“The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?”
“Perhaps this very instant is your time.”
“You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,You have said my name as a prayer.Here where trees are planted by waterI have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say.”
“Slipping in blood, by his own hand, through pride,Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus fall.Upon his bed, however, Shakespeare die,Having endured them all.”
“At midnight tearsRun into your ears.”
“Pasture, stone wall, and steeple,What most perturbs the mind:The heart-rending homely people,Or the horrible beautiful kind?”
“Goodbye, goodbye!There was so much to love, I could not love it all;I could not love it enough.”
“In the country whereto I goI shall not see the face of my friendNor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;Together we shall not findThe land on whose hills bends the new moonIn air traversed of birds.What have I thought of love?I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow."I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendorAs a wind out of old time . . .But there is only the evening here,And the sound of willowsNow and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.-- from "Betrothed”
“I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!”
“You need some place to work in. That's the door half open.”
“The soprano studies for seven years in order to be able to open her mouth and make loud sounds for three hours on end.”
“Tea instead of gin will warm the heart.”
“...Unaccustomed sense of peace did not depend on...'the whim of any fallible creature, or...economic security, or the weather. I don't know where it comes from. Jung states that such serenity is always a miracle...I am so glad that the therapists of my maturity and the saints of my childhood agree on one thing.”
“Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom and wherever deserved.Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless And it isn't for you.”
“...in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.”
“I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.”
“O rememberIn your narrowing dark hoursThat more things moveThan blood in the heart.”