Some Irish Connections of Maine Poet Louise Bogan (1897-1970), America's First Female Poet Laureate

 

Louise Bogan photo, courtesy of Library of Congress

Acclaimed American poet Louise Bogan (1897-1970) was born in Livermore Falls, Maine on August 11, 1897, the daughter of Irish Catholic parents whose own parents had emigrated from Donegal and Derry in the 19th century. 

A story in the Livermore Advertiser in September 2023 reveals more about her ancestry. “Bogan was the granddaughter of a sea captain who emigrated from Ireland to Portland, Maine, before the potato famine of the 1840s. The couple had 12 children and built a home on Captain’s Hill in Portland. The eldest, Daniel Bogan, was Louise Bogan’s father, who married Mary Murphy Shields in 1882. ”

Because her father worked in paper mills and bottling plants, the family moved around often, in Maine, New Hampshire and finally to Andover, Massachusetts. 

Image courtesy of Beltway Poetry

Louise began writing poetry at age 14, attending both the Girls Latin School in Boston and then Boston University for one year. Bogan's encyclopedia entry notes that her classmate was poet and publisher Martha Foley, who remarked that Louise’s “only setback was her Irish ancestry. At that time, the Irish were widespread victims of discrimination, and the headmaster warned her that "no Irish girl could be the editor of the school magazine." 

At BU, Bogan was influenced by poets Amy Lowell, Louise Imogen Guiney and Edna St. Vincent Millay. She married a soldier in the army and moved to Greenwich Village in New York. 

Bogan had a successful life as a poet, publishing her first collection of poetry in 1923, followed by five other collections throughout her career. She was poetry editor of The New Yorker for nearly 40 years (1931-1969) and she herself was published in numerous literary magazines.

She wrote an insightful essay on Irish poet William Butler Yeats in The Atlantic Magazine in 1938, calling him "the greatest poet writing in English to-day, and Ireland the greatest it has ever known."

Writing in Saturday Review in 1941, William Rose Bennett wrote of Bogan, "Her poetry is, and always has been, intensely personal. She has inherited the Celtic magic of language, but has blended it somehow with the tartness of New England."

Courtesy of Library of Congress

In 1945, Bogan became the first woman selected as the Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress.  She also received the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1955 and two Guggenheim Fellowships.   She received nine MacDowell Fellowships and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1968.

Considered one of the finest lyrical poets in America, Louise Bogan died in Greenwich Village on February 4, 1970 at age 72.  Her body was cremated.

Research + Text, Michael Quinlin