Dark Summer.
Bogan, Louise. Dark Summer. Poems. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929.
8vo.; pinhole in front endpaper; blue cloth; rubbed; edges sunned; wear and a few nicks to extremities; printed labels on cover and spine; red dust-jacket; darkened, faded, and edgeworn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of Bogan’s second collection of poems, the result of several “peaceful months” spent with her second husband, the poet Raymond Holden, on their fruit farm in Hillsdale, New York, a year after their marriage. Most had seen previous publication in Scribner’s Magazine, The Measure, The Nation, The New Republic, “Books” (The New York Herald Tribune), Poetry: A Magazine Of Verse, and The Century, as well as in McBride’s 1923 anthology Body Of This Death. “Containing her two longest poems, ‘The Flume’ and ‘summer Wish,’ as well as such lyrics as ‘simple Autumnal’ and ‘Come, Break with Time,’ the collection was marked by a formal perfection which demanded comparison ‘with the best songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’” (NAW, p. 89). A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title to fellow poet: For Lee Anderson/ Louise Bogan/ 1 February 1960. After the publication of Dark Summer, the bulk of Bogan’s personal books, letters, and manuscripts were destroyed in a fire.
In her poetry and criticism Louise Bogan (1897-1970) fertilized the seeds sewn by English metaphysical poets like John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell, and, later, by Rainier Maria Rilke, with “the technical discoveries and spiritual concerns of such modern masters as Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Auden” (NAW, p. 90). These combined ideals were evidenced by her 38 years worth of New Yorker reviews, by critical volumes such as Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (1951) and Selected Criticism: Poetry and Prose (1955), as well as by her poetry, in which Auden once noted “that unflinching courage with which she faced her problems, her determination never to surrender to self-pity, but to wrest beauty and joy out of dark places” (ibid.).
Bogan overcame the trauma of a disjointed home life in various New England mill towns, as well as Bostonian bigotry against persons of Irish extraction, to publish her first mature poetry at the age of 20 in Others, a journal of experimental verse. After spending a year in Vienna, she published her first collection, the critically acclaimed Body of This Death (1923), which established her at the forefront of the rising generation of poets. Dark Summer appeared in 1929, and in 1933 a Guggenheim fellowship sent her to Italy, France, and Austria on a search for directions in which to develop her voice. The trials she suffered upon her return to a failed marriage, however, presented a greater challenge to her poetry; the results appeared in The Sleeping Fury in 1937. In 1941 she published Poems and New Poems but, despite her new Chair in Poetry at the Library of Congress (1945-46), she wrote no poems for the better part of the decade. In 1948 she turned to teaching and began the first of several collaborative translations that would include Goëthe and Ernst Jünger with Elizabeth Mayer, Valéry with May Sarton, and Jules Renard with Elizabeth Roget. Her 1954 Collected Poems received the Bolligen Prize. Other collections include The Blue Estuaries 1923-68 (1968) and Poet’s Alphabet (1970).
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