Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of Louise Bogan

by Lee Upton

This study argues for a new reading of Bogan, whose complex position in regard to gender makes her one of the most provocative of the major modernists. Lee Upton analyzes the ways in which Bogan's poetry reflects unconscious processes marked by women's experiences, and she also explores both the implicit and the explicit violence that the poems embody in their opposition to psychological and social constraints. Rather than a repressed poet as she is figured in much contemporary criticism, Bogan is seen as self-consciously studying repression in poems of extreme confrontation, reflecting an aesthetic of difference, and intimating the workings of the unconscious. Upton argues that Bogan based her authority on her allegiance to the subversive unconscious rather than on cultural law.
Upton investigates Bogan's themes of obsession and release, among the primary psychic activities that her poetry charts. Obsession is portrayed as excessive preoccupation with betrayal in love and psychological engulfment, particularly as it is embodied in an unnamed force and culturally positioned to deny the female poet's "breath," and thus her art. In Bogan's allegiance to the lyric, the impassioned "cry," she expressed her desire to understand obsession. Increasingly beset by her own imaginative silences after the publication of her third book, Bogan sought to dramatize the process of release from obsessive fears of betrayal and entrapment.

170 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1996

About the author

Lee Upton writes books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and literary criticism. Her comic novel, Tabitha, Get Up, will be released in May 2024 from Sagging Meniscus Press. A literary mystery is forthcoming in 2025. She is also the author of The Day Every Day Is, winner of the Saturnalia Books Prize, and two collections of short stories, The Tao of Humiliation, and Visitations, which were both awarded the Kirkus Star. The Tao of Humiliation received the BOA Short Fiction Prize. Her novella, The Guide to the Flying Island, was awarded the Miami University Novella Prize. Her collection of essays, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy, received ForeWord Review's Book of the Year Award in the category of books about writing. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, and in three editions of Best American Poetry.