[Janice D. Soderling]

Check out this too, Mary.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps...ogan/bogan.htm

[Gregory Dowling]

Mary, thanks so much for starting this thread, and everyone else for contributing. She was little more than a name to me and I'm now totally won over and look forward to reading her extensively (or maybe in depth, since it seems she didn't write extensively). I also love her reading voice. And what Mary says about the New Yorker archives makes it sound a very good reason for subscribing.

Anyone know the answer to Andrew's question as to what she was doing in Vienna?

[Mary Meriam]

Thanks, John, Janice, and Gregory.

I found Elizabeth Frank's biography of Bogan HERE. I don't know if this link will work, but if you do a search for Vienna, some of the story appears on page 51. Still reading, but it says she intended to spend six months writing and studying piano in Vienna, a city which "entered her imagination with a power not unlike the discovery of responsive love" (according to Elizabeth Frank).

[Gregory Dowling]

Thanks for the link, Mary. I can't actually get to page 51, though I may be going the wrong way about it. But I suppose it's too much to expect that absolutely everything should be accessible via the web.

In any case, I need to read the poems first. - and those I want on paper.

[Tim Murphy]

Juan's Song

When beauty breaks and falls asunder
I feel no grief for it, but wonder.
When love, like a frail shell, lies broken,
I keep no chip of it for token.
I never had a man for friend
Who did not know that love must end.
I never had a girl for lover
Who could discern when love was over.
What the wise doubt, the fool believes--
Who is it, then, that love deceives?

I can't find my copy of Blue Estuaries. Bogan had some weird ideas, such as her notion that Frost was all washed up when he published his first two books, A Boy's Will and North of Boston. Maybe she didn't read the later ones! Blue Estuaries is a terrific book, and I urge everyone to acquire it.

[T.S. Kerrigan]

I share your frustration, Tim. I'm always looking for Bogan and never get enough of her. She was an original in her day and, for me remains so.

[Roger Slater]

It's neither here nor there, but I believe that she and Roethke were an item at one time, before Roethke got famous, and she was at the time more impressed with the man than the man's poetry, though later it was the other way around.

PS-- I've Googled a bit and found this is a rather familiar piece of information, apparently formative to Roethke's career as Bogan was a prominent critic when they were introduced by Rolf Humphries at Roethke's request.