LETTERS: Louise Bogan-William Shawn Correspondence.
Louise Bogan:
Correspondence with William Shawn
1931-1969
Bogan, Louise. Correspondence with William Shawn and related materials, 1931-1969.
Eleven letters from Louise Bogan to William Shawn, from 1931-1969, together with five of Shawn’s carbon replies. Also included are supplementary letters to Shawn: an interdepartmental memo from Bill Maxwell regarding Bogan, three letters from Elizabeth Perlmutter, who wrote a critical biography of Bogan, and one letter from Ruth Limmer, the executor of Bogan’s estate; together with Shawn’s replies to them.
Bogan proposes to write several poetry reviews for The New Yorker; they are often pieces in which she wishes to compare several books of poetry, the poets, or different poetic styles in one review; Shawn is enthusiastic about them. She is apologetic about delays in sending in submissions, but Shawn is perpetually understanding of her situation and her work habits; Bogan is grateful for the creative leeway Shawn permits her.
Her May 24, 1964 letter, for example, almost reads like an abstract for an academic paper. She explains:
I have been turning over in my mind the possibility of a Verse piece which will analyze, instead of praising, several books of poetry which have come to hand, recently. –No one really looks closely, at present, at certain kinds of poetry – at the “confessional” kind, for example, which Robert Lowell has written of late years, and which he singled out for favorable notice, in specific instances. Then there is the tendency, at the moment, in the work of one or two fairly young men, to approach a kind of dialect: John Berryman, in his recent 77 Dream Songs (Farrar, Strauss) goes in for sort of minstrel show jargon, for example. – and has received a good deal of praise for his former Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which is written in a kind of imitation 17th century speech.
Perhaps some remarks concerning these two “trends” – the confessional and the language-distorting – could be combined, in an article. I intend to try such an article, in any case.
Shawn’s letter from October 30, 1969 to Bogan is touching; he thanks and praises her highly for her years of work for The New Yorker: “The very presence of your finely constructed sentences – of your tone – has constantly raised the literary level of the surrounding pages, whatever they might be, and of The New Yorker as a whole, and been one of the reasons we can hold our head up.” Bogan’s correspondence ends with the short note dated November 5, 1969, in which she thanks him for his “lovely letter,” and promises to send him a copy of a forthcoming book of her selected prose, due out in 1970. She died three months later.
INVENTORY:
Typed letter signed, “Louise,” to “Bill,” February 19, 1962; one leaf of typing paper. Updating him on her health; adds, as a postscript, news that she won the Brandeis Creative Arts Award for Poetry.
Typed letter signed, “Louise Bogan,” to “Mr. Shawn,” May 24, 1964; one leaf of typing paper, creased; with Bogan’s inked annotations to the typed text. Proposes a piece in which she will analyze confessional and “language-distorting” trends she has noticed in contemporary poetry; specifically, works by John Berryman, Karl Shapiro, and the 1964 Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry, Louis Simpson.
Autograph letter signed, “Louise Bogan,” to “Mr. Shawn,” November 1, 1964; two leaves of blue writing paper, creased (a typed transcription is also included). Informs him of a book review that she will write by the end of November, in which she discusses Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead, Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings and D.H. Lawrence’s Collected Poems in relation to each other.
Typed letter carbon, “William Shawn,” to “Miss Bogan,” November 4, 1964; one leaf of paper.. Tells her the piece she suggested in the November 1 letter sounds “promising.”
Typed letter signed, “Louise Bogan,” to “Mr. Shawn,” August 8, 1965; one leaf of typing pa
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