Louise Bogan, "The Blue Estuaries"

When reading Louise  Bogan I imagine that she wanted to be William Shakespeare, in that she was so good at being him, really good, while staying a woman, a woman of her time (1897-1970) and place (mostly New York City).

There are hundred, thousands, hundred of thousands of male poets who also wanted to be William Shakespeare, but there was and is only one Louise Bogan.

No other poet other than William Shakespeare has written on the womanhood of men or the manhood of women as conscientiously and with as much understanding of the plight of each as has Louise Bogan.

The formality with which Shakespeare wrote his poems, a formality for the most part bestowed upon him by those who wrote or read him well after he'd written his poems, is the formality acknowledged by Bogan and the tradition in which she operated as a poet. Her precisions of metaphor, meter and rhyme are Shakespearian, had Shakespeare been a woman writing in the 20th century.

It is easier to reconstruct William Shakespeare's life as a man and as a poet, of which we really know very little, than it is to reconstruct Louise Bogan's life as a woman and a poet, though we know a little more.

"The Blue Estuaries, Poems 1923-1968", Louise Bogan, The Ecco Press, New York, 1977.