Mary Kinzie's Bogan.(Louise Bogan A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan)(Book Review)

Louise Bogan A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, edited by Mary Kinzie. Swallow Press, 394 pages, $19.95 (paper)

Most readers will recognize the name of the lyric poet Louise Bogan (if at all) as a brief stop on the way from Elizabeth Bishop to Gwendolyn Brooks in modern poetry anthologies. Two decades after a temporary resurgence spurred by Elizabeth Frank's Pulitzer-prize winning biography, Louise Bogan: A Portrait, her literary status was once again threatening to fade into the shadows and solitude that she herself so coveted during her long career as a poet, essayist, and literary reviewer. So we welcome Mary Kinzie's new edition of Bogan's fiction, letters, and criticism as a timely if not altogether well-executed attempt to draw this literary recluse back into the public eye.

An iconoclast and moralist, Bogan shared none of Ezra Pound's taste for literary bombast nor T. S. Eliot's flare for moral oratory. Yet the confident, plaintive verse in her slim Collected Poems, 1923-1953 won her the Bollingen in 1955 and an award from the Academy of American Poets in 1959, and thirty-eight years worth of keen, incisive essays for The New Yorker made her one of the most influential and widely read arbiters of modernism. Thanks to Kinzie, we are now privy to Bogan as a writer of fiction as well. These (mostly) previously uncollected short stories are, like her lyrics, bold and deliberate. She's at her best in pieces like "Journey Around My Room" and "The Short Life of Emily" where she allows her prickly wit and cunning self-awareness to come to the fore instead of lurking behind an anonymous narrator. They are transcripts of an unusually alert, sensitive imagination filtering a wide spectrum of experience--from pushing through a horde of needle-working spinsters in "Art Embroidery" to suffering the tortuous "cures" of depression in "Hydrotherapy"--into a language characterized by both modern playfulness and Victorian elegance.

Into this prose miscellany Kinzie has also gathered a number of Bogan's review essays, wherein we have the pleasure to rediscover the acclaimed masters of modernism with an underestimated master as our guide. Unfortunately, her more scathing pieces are missing, leaving us with an illuminating but sometimes timid tour through this period of literary bravado and experiment. ...