Louise Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, in 1897. She attended Boston Girls’ Latin School and, for one year, Boston University. She married Kurt Alexander in 1916 and was widowed in 1920. In 1925, she married her second husband, the poet Raymond Holden, whom she divorced in 1937. Her poems were published in the New Republic, the Nation, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Scribner’s and Atlantic Monthly. For thirty-eight years, she reviewed poetry for The New Yorker.

Because Bogan was reclusive and disliked talking about herself, details regarding her private life are scarce. She wrote most of her poetry in the earlier half of her life when she published Body of This Death (1923), Dark Summer (1929) and The Sleeping Fury (1937). She published volumes of her collected verse in 1941 and 1954, and finally The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, an overview of her life’s work in poetry. She died in New York City in 1970.

From the Bogan Papers – Amherst College Archives and Special Collections