The Blue Estuaries

by Louise Bogan

Honored, during the course of her literary career, with almost every major poetry award, Louise Bogan (1898-1970) was the poetry critic for The New Yorker for nearly forty years. The Blue Estuaries contains her five previous books of verse along with a section of uncollected work, fully representing a unique and distinguished contribution to modern poetry over five decades.

Genres: Poetry, American, Literature, Poetry Plays, Womens, The United States Of America

144 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1974

About the author

She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945.

As poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine for nearly 40 years, Bogan played a major role in shaping mainstream poetic sensibilities of the mid-20th Century.

The Poetry Foundation notes that Bogan has been called by some critics the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century. It further notes that, "Some critics have placed her in a category of brilliant minor poets described as the "reactionary generation." This group eschewed the prevailing Modernist forms that would come to dominate the literary landscape of the era in favor of more traditional techniques.

Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier named Bogan "one of the finest lyric poets America has produced," and added that "the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending."

Elizabeth Frank's biography of Louise Bogan, Louise Bogan: A Portrait, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986.

Reviews

[Mir]

And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again. I am the chosen no hand saves:
The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.

[Jee Koh · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found one truly memorable poem in the collection, a sharp observation transformed by a peculiar sensibility, a formula advocated elsewhere in the book but rarely followed. Even in this instance, the poem would have been better served if the last line had been removed.

Roman Fountain

Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain's bowl
After the air of summer.

[Arlitia Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read and re read this book many times over the years and I'm always grateful when I find my way back to it. It seems to remind me of something essential I have forgotten about myself. Rereading this time I chose it as my first book of 2017 because of its intense sense of purpose, beauty and unease. Bogan is a brilliant poet, never coddling or charming her reader with easy turns of phrase geared only for delight. Her poems unsettle, prick and stab, rage and smolder. They hold wonder and darkness in exquisite detail. Her lines are formal, but the language within is supple and what comes across is a woman of great strength who wields her craft as a shield and a weapon. There is truth and great wisdom in these poems and I read them as preparation for the year to come.

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bogan faces pain with bravery more than hope. She expresses dark emotions in severe forms.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The words and images attract me. Many poems seem to be about love, especially love lost. I feel like I am missing all of the context, but that is often the case with published poems. We only have what has been printed. Torn between 3 and 4 stars, but I did enjoy the language used in these poems, so 4 stars.

[Luke Gorham · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2. Very uneven, but the highs are way high.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Theodore Roethke said of Louise Bogan: “For the most part, she writes out of the severest lyrical tradition in English.” This is perhaps why I found her mostly inscrutable. But if I ever feel that way about a poem, I always assume that it’s my failure; I am never confident in my reading of poetry. I always struggle to write about it or say what I feel. So, here: Some lovely lines? Enchanting images? But I feel like most of it escaped me.

Here’s a straightforward one, containing this book's title:

NIGHT

The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;

—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.

[Steph De Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection contains five volumes of Bogan's poetry, alongside a section of uncollected work. Her poetry is lyrical, dream-like, and sensuous, peopled by dark shades and ghostly images of the natural world. "Night", "Song for the Last Act", "Putting to Sea", and "Fifteenth Farewell" are particularly beautiful and richly layered with meaning.

Nonetheless, I find many of the poems in "The Blue Estuaries" difficult and inaccessible. I suspect that Bogan is one of those poets whose work one must read several times over in order fully to appreciate. While I'm certainly willing to try reading this one again in the future, I'm giving it three stars for now, largely on account of this inscrutability.

I will, however, unreservedly award five stars to her achingly lovely poem "Leave-Taking", which, sadly, is not included in this collection, but which I recommend to anyone who enjoys lyric poetry.

[B Sarv · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could identify poems that struck me deeply but then what would be the fun in that? I found this book among a number of poetry collections I took from my late mother’s bookshelf. Remarkably I came across all of her annotations to various poems, so the real joy in reading for me came from connecting with her in spite of her having passed so many years ago.

So for you, reading this review, you may think my rating is tainted by nostalgia for a past relationship. My failing may be that if I enjoy a book I rate it high. Bogan’s poems are often captivating and thought provoking. This morning ritual I formed of reading poetry instead of the news has been good for me. I recommend it no matter which poet you may come across in your wandering. To my fellow travelers I recommend this book. Enjoy.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense poems.

They tell the truth about love and loss and hate.
I can`t quite put my emotions into words but it seems that Miss Bogan can. I am facinated but I have to admit that i`ll have to reread a lot of the poems because even thou they have all been very beautiful the first times I read them, I have not understood all of them so far.

But to be honest that makes these poems even more facinating because I want to figure them out ( as far as it is possible to figure poems out at all)

[Phil Greaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered Bogan through 'Poem of the Day' emails which means I wish it were earlier in my life but I'm glad of it at all. When I read her I lament the paucity of most other poetry I read in those daily emails, especially contemporary poetry. That is unfair, I know. But her language! The intricacies, the lyricism, the grand themes, the wider look. I love her poetry and I envy those, late or early, who are about to discover it.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I ever render back your heart
So long to me delight and plunder,
It will be bound with the firm strings
That men have built the viol under.

Your stubborn, piteous heart, that bent
To be the place where music stood,
Uopn some shaken instrument
Stained with the dark of resinous blood,

Will find its place, beyond denial,
Will hear the dance, O be most sure,
Laid on the curved wood of the viol
Or on the struck tambour.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are hard-edged, elegiac, beautiful, and mysterious. I read them over and over and find something new in them each time. They feel ancient, like something carved on a plinth, and modern, as if they were first uttered yesterday. This volume of poetry should be in everyone's library.

[Mark Rotolo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish Goodreads did half stars, 3.5 feels more accurate. Plenty of music and nature inspired poems. Idk all that much about poetry but still enjoyed most of these. Section 5 was prob my favorite of the collections. Might revisit at some point.

[Akshat Jha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though I found it a little difficult to get into some of her poems, I loved the music and the choice of words in her poetry.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Some of these are very striking; others, less so.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

How I love the title of this collection and its soothing connotations! However, the title belies the menacing creatures that lurk in these poems below the surface of the book’s placid blue covers: the poet’s quest for the secrets of the buried self, or unconscious (“Cassandra”); the frustrations of romantic love and its attendant losses and betrayals (“Fifteenth Farewell”); and the demons from a traumatic childhood that continue to haunt her (“Girl’s Song,” “Summer Wish,” “The Sleeping Fury”).

Favorite Poems:
“Medusa”
“Sub Contra”
“Statue and Birds”
“The Alchemist”
“The Crows”
“Women”
“Fifteenth Farewell”
“Summer Wish”
“Man Alone”
“Evening in the Sanitarium”
“The Sorcerer’s Daughter”

[Sienna · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems impossible — or, if not impossible, because, after all, it's true, then at least really rather wrong. How is it that I only discovered Louise Bogan in May of this year? Why isn't she better known outside of the circles that already celebrate her work? Bogan's eloquence, depth of feeling and sharp-eyed restraint give voice to both head and heart. Her words move; they illuminate and adumbrate; they startle. It's difficult to do justice to a collection that spans four and a half decades. These poems reflect subtle stylistic shifts, changes in perspective, the weight of time: heartache and gratitude.

There's a lot of rhyming in the earlier collections. This results in a formal, occasionally stilted, sound to my modern ear, but it also produces moments of utter beauty:

Knowledge

Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,—

I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.

"Summer Wish," the longest piece here, floored me. I hesitate to quote from it because the sum is so much more powerful than individual parts. But: "It is the month to make the summer wish; / It is time to ask / The wish from summer as always: It will be, / It will be." In two voices Bogan recalls tragedy, passion, hope, the play of light on flora, on water, as the seasons change. She turns the act of wishing into a ritual that requires every last bit of focus and desire and strength and vision in the person wishing:

Speak out the wish like music, that has within it
The horn, the string, the drum pitched deep as grief.
Speak it like laughter, outward. O brave, O generous
Laughter that pours from the well of the body and draws
The bane that cheats the heart: aconite, nightshade,
Hellebore, hyssop, rue, — symbols and poisons
We drink, in fervor, thinking to gain thereby
Some difference, some distinction.
Speak it, as that man said, as though the earth spoke,
By the body of rock, shafts of heaved strata, separate,
Together.
Though it be but for sleep at night,
Speak out the wish.

And who hasn't played the solitary, resigned, questing game of "Cartography"?

As you lay in sleep
I saw the chart
Of artery and vein
Running from your heart,

Plain as the strength
Marked upon the leaf
Along the length,
Mortal and brief,

Of your gaunt hand.
I saw it clear:
The wiry brand
Of the life we bear

Mapped like the great
Rivers that rise
Beyond our fate
And distant from our eyes.

This book contains an abundance of joy and sadness, too many perfect moments for me to highlight here. "Night," which I've read before, again and again, remains the pinnacle. Other favorites include "Betrothed" ("What have I thought of love? / I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow."); "Dark Summer," "Henceforth, from the Mind" and "Evening Star"; "For a Marriage," "Several Voices Out of A Cloud," which shocked me (in a good way) with its straight-backed, raised-arm conviction; the cheeky, impossible-not-to-relate-to "Question in a Field" ("Pasture, stone wall, and steeple, / What most perturbs the mind: / The heart-rending homely people, / Or the horrible beautiful kind?"); "Animal, Vegetable and Mineral," which takes on the humble bee; and "Evening in the Sanitarium," which finds its rhythm in the rocking of minds.

I can't help admiring in Bogan what we often condescendingly describe as pluck: it's a mixture of pride and courage and virtue, the confidence to believe in herself even when temporarily flattened by the world in beautifully articulated but ultimately opaque ways, a quality you don't expect to find thriving in someone who worked as the poetry critic for The New Yorker for thirty-eight years. But nothing could be fitting in the case of a woman who said, upon resigning this position, "No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square." (Wow. Yes!) I'm so grateful to learn she left more words behind for us to read.

Goodbye, goodbye!
There was so much to love, I could not love it all;
I could not love it enough.

(from "After the Persian")

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I browse a book of poetry, the imagery and tone either captures me at once, or I put it back almost immediately and think, nope. There is very little room for anything in between, and I usually reserve that for the classics of poetry that would be found on a college reading list. Louise Bogan's poetry compilation "The Blue Estuaries" had me at the title. I had recently found myself thinking of estuaries for some random reason, and looking through the poetry section at Third Place Books, I gravitated immediately towards the word and blue book binding.

With adroit lyricism, Bogan's poetry inhabits that space we find ourselves in when we look out in thoughtful silence upon a scene of natural beauty. Contemplative, emotionally reflective, and intimate without being confessional, I love the mood it evokes in me. Her phrasing is complex and entrancing, vacillating between the internal and external world. Each poem has a flow to it that doesn't feel forced, even when they take a more traditional form. I was very surprised when I looked at her biography that I had never heard of her before, but I am now grateful that she has come to my awareness.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Louise Bogan, a 20th century American poet and critic, was our country's fourth Poet Laureate. She was poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine for nearly forty years. Although her output was relatively small, she produced nuanced, compact, lyrical poems of high quality and intensity, written in a formal style.

I found some of her poems a bit obscure, but I had the distinct impression that it was my shortcoming, not hers. I would describe many of her poems as tantalizingly elusive, like getting a glimpse of a mysterious figure disappearing around the corner. Her poems are cool in the sense of being very controlled and formal, but beneath that restrained surface there are depths of emotional intensity. Her poems demand careful reading. I look forward to reading her poems again.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unversed as I am in her work, I imagine I see why she has been overlooked by contemporary poets and anthologies, justly and unjustly. Her early work is quite versified, pretty and ornate but hollow at the core. As influences like Auden became ascendant she seemed to play with less strict rhythms and forms, but more as experiments than methods. The overall effect is of a very talented craftsman lacking the solid vision the great modernists conveyed. So while there are individual poems that are true gems ("Medusa," "Kept," "The Daemon") as a whole it seems less than the sum of its parts, beautiful pictures that ring false to my 21st-century sensibility.

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.

There's a reason Bogan is better known as the New Yorker Editor of Poetry and not a poet. Largely derivative, From Heine is just a translation of Der Tod Das Ist de Kuhle Nacht with two of the verses knocked out of it, for instance. There is improvement in the later poems but even there, the poet could have used an editor other than herself.

Not without its charms and humor, one of the later poems has a title that is longer than the poem, and I'd like to think that was some self deprecating humor. But mostly these poems and their poet take themselves far too seriously, leaving out the art and focusing on the message in as wordy a way as possible.

[Aeisele · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...Where lies the leaf-caught world once thought abiding,/Now but a dry disarray and artifice?" (from "Winter Swan"). Bogan is probably the greatest technical American poet of the 20th century (or at least her and Elizabeth Bishop). She was so in command of the technical mechanism of language that her poems never needed to be more than a page, and within that page, she would say as much as T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound said in 20 pages (plus she wasn't an anti-semite or a fascist). Anyway, some of my favorites: "My Voice Not Being Proud", "Sonnet", "Medusa", "Feuer-Nacht".

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of Louise Bogan's poetry, who is considered by some to be the most accomplished female poet of the twentieth century. What a pity that I had not read her work before. She uses traditional techniques and accomplishes so much with an economy of words. This anthology shows her evolution as a poet through the years.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished up the last bit that I skirted around during the semester. I'd never read Bogan before and it seems astonishing that I hadn't—she feels so important to me now.

O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.

—"Night"

[Xio · Rating 3 out of 5]

At midnight tears. Run in your ears.

[Ccmaria62 crow · Rating 5 out of 5]

deep, sumptuous, ok and dark.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing poet, and many of these poems will leave you feeling like you've been kicked in the gut (they're so beautiful).

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poet spoke to me truly in the late 1970s as I became more aware of who I was and hwy I did what I did.

[Michaela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved reading this, especially as it got more and more intriguing as I read through to her later works.