A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings Of Louise Bogan

by Bogan, Louise

• ISBN13: 9780804010719
• ISBN10: 0804010714
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-06-13
• Publisher: Ohio Univ Pr

Summary

Although best known as a master of the formal lyric poem, Louise Bogan (1897 1970) also published fiction and what would now be called lyrical essays. A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan showcases her devotion to compression, eloquence, and sharp truths. Louise Bogan was poetry reviewer for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years, and her criticism was remarkable for its range and effect. Bogan was responsible for the revival of interest in Henry James and was one of the first American critics to notice and review W. H. Auden. She remained intellectually and emotionally responsive to writers as different from one another as Caitlin Thomas, Dorothy Richardson, W. B. Yeats, Andre Gide, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Bogan's short stories appeared regularly in magazines during the 1930s, penetrating the social habits of the city as well as the loneliness there. The autobiographical element in her fiction and journals, never entirely confessional, spurred some of her finest writing. The distinguished poet and critic Mary Kinzie provides in A Poet's Prose a selection of Bogan's best criticism, prose meditations, letters, journal entries, autobiographical essays, and published and unpublished fiction.

Author Biography

Louise Bogan, poetry reviewer for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years, won the Bollingen Prize in 1954 for her collected poems. She is the subject of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography by Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan: A Portrait. Editor Mary Kinzie is a poet and critic who teaches in the creative writing program she founded at Northwestern University. Her books of poetry include Summers of Vietnam and Autumn Eros. Most recently, her collection Drift was published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Table of Contents

Sources and Acknowledgments	ix
Editor's Note	xiii
Abbreviations	xiii
Books by Louise Bogan	xiv
Louise Bogan in Her Prose, by Mary Kinzie	xv
I. Fiction
Keramik (1927)	1	(5)
Winter Morning (1928)	6	(1)
Art Embroidery (1928)	7	(2)
Soliloquy (1928)	9	(2)
Hydrotherapy (1931)	11	(2)
Sabbatical Summer (1931)	13	(5)
When It Is Over (1931)	18	(1)
Zest (1931)	19	(5)
Journey Around My Room (1933)	24	(4)
The Short Life of Emily (1933)	28	(3)
The Last Tear (1933)	31	(3)
Conversation Piece (1933)	34	(4)
Coming Out (1933)	38	(3)
Dove and Serpent (1933)	41	(4)
Letdown (1934)	45	(4)
Not Love, but Ardor (1934)	49	(2)
To Take Leave (1935)	51	(2)
Saturday Night Minimum (1935)	53	(2)
Whatever It Is (1936)	55	(4)
II. Journals and Memoir
On the Bogans	59	(1)
Self-Portrait, with Politics	60	(2)
Unsent Questionnaire	62	(3)
Self-Questionnaire	65	(4)
The Sudden Marigolds	69	(2)
The Gardner Family	71	(3)
Mary Shields Bogan	74	(5)
Childhood in Boston	79	(2)
The Repressed Narrative	81	(2)
The Aperçu	83	(1)
Managing the Unconscious	84	(3)
Thumbnails	87	(3)
Out of All Moments Forever	90	(2)
The Time of Day	92	(4)
How Can I Break These Mornings?	96	(1)
Final Questionnaire	97	(2)
III. Letters	99	(98)
IV. Criticism
Colette (1930)	197	(3)
William Butler Yeats (1934, 1936, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1951)	200	(20)
W.H. Auden (1934, 1935, 1937, 1938, 1941, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1951, 1955, 1957, 1960)	220	(21)
Henry James (1936, 1944, 1945)	241	(14)
T.S. Eliot (1936, 1939, 1943)	255	(5)
Federico Garcia Lorca (1937, 1940)	260	(1)
Elizabeth Bowen (1939)	261	(3)
James Joyce (1939, 1944)	264	(8)
Ezra Pound (1940, 1948, 1956)	272	(6)
Gustave Flaubert (1942)	278	(5)
Folk Art (1943)	283	(10)
Isak Dinesen (1943)	293	(2)
Detective Novels (1944)	295	(4)
André Gide (1944, 1947, 1948)	299	(9)
Robert Lowell (1946, 1959, 1965, 1967)	308	(5)
Charles Baudelaire (1947)	313	(2)
The Heart and the Lyre (1947)	315	(5)
Marianne Moore (1948)	320	(2)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1949)	322	(4)
Wallace Stevens (1950, 1954)	326	(4)
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1951)	330	(1)
Caitlin Thomas (1957)	331	(3)
Juan Ramón Jiménez (1958)	334	(3)
Philip Larkin (1958, 1965)	337	(1)
Dorothy Richardson (1967)	338	(7)
POETRY APPENDIX
Uncollected Poems
A Night in Summer (1911)	345	(1)
The Betrothal of King Cophetua (1915)	346	(1)
The Young Wife (1917)	347	(2)
Survival (1921)	349	(1)
Elders (1922)	350	(1)
Resolve (1922)	350	(1)
Leave-Taking (1922)	351	(1)
To a Dead Lover (1922)	352	(1)
Decoration (1923)	353	(1)
A Letter (1923)	353	(2)
Words for Departure (1923)	355	(2)
Epitaph for a Romantic Woman (1923)	357	(1)
Song ("Love me because I am lost") (1923)	357	(1)
Pyrotechnics (1923)	357	(1)
The Stones (1923)	358	(1)
Trio (1923)	358	(1)
The Flume (1929)	358	(6)
Old Divinity (1929)	364	(1)
For an Old Dance (1930)	364	(1)
The Engine (1931)	365	(1)
Gift (1932)	366	(1)
Hidden (1936)	367	(1)
New Moon (1937)	368	(1)
Untitled ("Tender and insolent") (1937)	369	(1)
The Catalpa Tree (1951)	369	(1)
Unpublished Poems and Drafts-Dated Works Second Act Curtain (1933)	370	(12)
Lines Written After Detecting in Myself a Yearning toward the Large, Wise, Calm, Richly Resigned, Benignant Act Put On by a Great Many People After Having Passed the Age of Thirty-five (1934)	372	(1)
The Lie (1935)	372	(2)
Lines Written on Coming To Late in the Afternoon (1935)	374	(1)
"I put the supposed" (1935)	374	(1)
"We might have striven years" (1935)	375	(1)
Four Quarters (1936)	376	(1)
"You labor long to fit the pearl" (1936)	377	(1)
Entrance, with Harp and Fiddles (1936-37)	377	(1)
Poem at Forty (1937)	378	(1)
Mozart [translation] (1939)	378	(1)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman (1940)	379	(1)
Leechdoms (1961)	380	(1)
The Castle of My Heart: A Rondel [translation] (1966)	381	(1)
December Daybreak (1967)	381	(1)
Unpublished Poems and Drafts-Undated Works Fortune-Teller's Pack	382	(5)
Fantasy	383	(1)
"In what still rays"	384	(1)
Beginning of an Unpopular Song	384	(1)
Letter to Mrs. Q's Sister	384	(1)
Three Sonnets in Autumn	385	(1)
Love Severally Rhymed	385	(1)
"O come again, distilled"	386	(1)
"When at last"	386	(1)
Index of Names	387	(5)
Index of Prose by Louise Bogan	392	(1)
Index of Poetry by Louise Bogan	393