“That woman will be able to do anything,” declared Robert Frost after reading Louise Bogan’s “A Tale,” the opening poem in her first book, Body of This Death. At the time of the book’s publication in 1923, Bogan was just 26 but had already experienced marriage, motherhood, estrangement, and widowhood, as well as launched a career as an incisive critic and technically masterful lyric poet. Frost’s assessment was high praise, but as a casual prediction it seems impossible to fulfill. When Bogan’s definitive collected works, The Blue Estuaries, appeared in 1968, just two years before her death, the volume contained 105 poems—hardly a negligible output, but evidence that her periods of creative frustration far outnumbered those of productivity. She could “do” anything— and did a great deal—but she did most of it with that first volume and even, arguably, with that first poem.
Bogan’s loyalty to conventional meters, rhyme schemes, and imagery may give a superficial impression of starchy high-mindedness set to music. In her first volume, you won’t find a lot of imagistic razzle-dazzle or ornamentation. The poems are relentlessly austere, scattered with shards, echoes, withdrawing tides, and mowed-down fields. She mistrusted the lily-gilding and lush sighs of the Romantic and Victorian verse that had nourished her as an adolescent, and she was equally suspicious of what she saw as the high-strung and erotic expressions of fellow “lady poets” she otherwise admired. She kept a tight lid on the emotional occasions of her poetry. Her poetic personae are often found in aftermaths, playing out the brittle affections left after the sensuous assaults of passion.”
Whatś wrong with you
How my heart sings 