August 11, 1897

Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897 to February 4, 1970) was poetry editor at The New Yorker for many decades. We have this biographical summary:

Louise Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, ...She attended Boston Girls’ Latin School and spent one year at Boston University. She married in 1916 and was widowed in 1920. In 1925, she married her second husband, the poet Raymond Holden, whom she divorced in 1937.

Her poems were published in the New Republic, the Nation, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Scribner’s and Atlantic Monthly....

Bogan found the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell and John Berryman distasteful and self-indulgent. With the poets whose work she admired, however, such as Theodore Roethke, she was extremely supportive and encouraging. She was reclusive and disliked talking about herself, and for that reason details are scarce regarding her private life. Bogan’s ability is unique in its strict adherence to lyrical forms, while maintaining a high emotional pitch: she was preoccupied with exploring the perpetual disparity of heart and mind.

The majority of her poetry was written in the earlier half of her life when she published Body of This Death (...1923), Dark Summer (...1929), and The Sleeping Fury (... 1937). She subsequently published volumes of her collected verse, and The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (..., 1968), an overview of her life’s work in poetry. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1968... She died in New York City....

Her reticence may have included not talking about cats. We know she had them. Here is a bit about her childhood, from Elizabeth Frank's biography: Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1986): As a child, Louise loved cats, and liked to dress them up.