Poets Prose: Selected Writings Of Louise Bogan [Hardcover]

Louise Bogan (Author), Mary Kinzie (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 4, 2005

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, André 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of Bogan’s best criticism, prose meditations, letters, journal entries, autobiographical essays, and published and unpublished fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Louise Bogan (1897–1970), the poet and longtime poetry reviewer for the New Yorker, was a formidable critic, particularly of her contemporaries. In this intelligently organized volume, poet and critic Kinzie (who founded the undergraduate creative writing program at Northwestern) includes Bogan's previously uncollected short fiction; extracts from her journals recollecting a grim New England mill-town childhood, letters to lifelong friends and colleagues, and Bogan's critical essays. The fifth and last section contains uncollected poems. Self-aware, self-berating and perpetually anxious about her poetic output, Bogan has a sharp and at times neurotic mind fully on display. Her letters reveal the warm intellectual friendships that sustained her—notably with Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate and lover and friend Theodore Roethke—but her critical essays are the volume's highlight, composed in an unmistakably personalized, flowing and penetrating critical voice. Here Bogan applauds the wit and liveliness of rising star W.H. Auden, endorses the lesser-known novels of Henry James, shrewdly dismisses an Elizabeth Bowen novel and writes absorbingly on contemporary literary giants Yeats, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Joyce and Pound. The poems, unsatisfying in their own right, are of scholarly interest to students focusing on Bogan's emerging lyric voice. (June)
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Review

"In whatever she wrote, the line of truth was exactly superimposed on the line of feeling. One look at her work—or sometimes one look at her—made any number of disheartened artists take heart and go on being the kind of dedicated creatures they were intended to be."—The New Yorker

“I am deeply grateful for this collection of Louise Bogan’s prose. She is an American lyric master, both in prose and poetry, a critic of singular distinction and acuity. She has not been given her due, and this collection will go far to redressing the balance. ”—Mary Gordon

“This master lyric poet’s crisp, insightful New Yorker pieces on poetry hold up superbly to the passing of time and fashions. But beyond those brilliant reviews, here are unexpected treasures: Bogan’s fiction, letters and journal entries disclose in new ways a literary mind of distinction, wit and depth. In the unpublished poems too, there are flashes of gold. A treasure-book.”—Robert Pinsky

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Swallow Press; 1 edition (June 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804010706
• ISBN-13: 978-0804010702
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,419,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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