This was not a woman to splatter herself all over the page. Instead, she wrote concise, well-crafted verse that is almost painfully restrained. She wrote a lot of love poems, but they’re vexingly anodyne. Something about them feels weak and emaciated, as if she was fearful of letting the language veer into the uncontrolled territory implied by her subject matter. I think it is this inhibition that damns her to eternal minor poet status.
Her personal life was apparently pretty sad; she married twice, both times unhappily, and had a daughter that she never much discussed with anyone. She and the decade-younger poet Theodore Roethke had a rather torrid affair in the mid-1930s; apparently, she didn’t think much of his work (though my sources are conflicting), but he immortalized her with a lovely lyric poem which will be forthcoming in another post on this blog.
This poem has been fluttering around in my head ever since we toured the underground cistern in Istanbul with the Medusa's head columns. I think it’s Bogan’s best. The tension between the immobilized stone figures created by the Medusa and the unrestrained fury and passion encapsulated by monster herself echoes the conflict in Bogan’s own poetry between tone and subject.
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