Louise Bogan: A Portrait

Louise Bogan wrote a small body of tightly controlled lyric poems, reviewed poetry for The New Yorker for almost forty years, and in 1945 became the fourth Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress and the first woman to hold the post. She was also, for long stretches, unable to write at all.

Frank's biography is unusually good on that second fact. Bogan's life contained a difficult childhood she rarely spoke about, two marriages, periods in psychiatric hospitals, and decades of criticism written partly because the poems would not come. The book takes the silences as seriously as the output and declines to explain them away.

It is a literary biography in the older sense: patient, chronological, closely attentive to the work, and willing to spend several pages on a single poem. Frank writes well and quotes generously, so a reader who has never read Bogan finishes with a clear sense of why she matters and usually goes looking for the collected poems.

Come to it for the portrait of a working critic rather than for drama. Bogan's judgments shaped how a generation of American readers encountered poetry, and Frank is very good on the peculiar position of a poet who reviews her contemporaries for a magazine that pays and constrains her. The book is out of the way now, out of print in most editions and absent from most shops, and it is worth the effort of finding. Biographies of critics are rare, biographies of women poets of that generation are rarer, and good ones are rarer still.