SOURCE: "Lethal Brevity: Louise Bogan's Lyric Career," in Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, edited by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen, University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 105–20.

In the following essay, Aldrich explores Bogan's inability to overcome the notion that a woman's artistic ability is linked to her youthfulness and sexual energy; Aldrich contends that this belief is reflected in Bogan's poetry.

The modernist poet Louise Bogan never wrote poetry easily or voluminously. Over her lifetime she published 105 collected poems, most of them written while she was in her twenties or thirties. The Sleeping Fury, published in 1937 when Bogan was forty years old, was her last book of new poems. She wrote no poetry from 1941 to 1949, and the Collected Poems, 1923–1953 added but three lyrics to the work gathered in Poems and New Poems, published in 1941. In her twenties Bogan was already contrasting her own writing blocks...