In 1970, at a memorial service for Louise Bogan, W.H. Auden identified what he thought to be the most enduring qualities of her lyric poetry: "aside from their technical excellence, [what] is most imp...
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The critic Malcolm Cowley remarked in a review of Louise Bogan's slim volume Poems and New Poems (1941) that she had "done something that has been achieved by very few of her contemporaries: she has a...
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Van Doren was one of the most prolific men of letters in twentieth-century American writing. His work includes poetry (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940), novels, short stories, drama, criti...
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In the following essay, Moore assesses the relationship between Bogan's feminist views and the verse forms and literary conventions she employed in her poetry.
Styles are symptoms. This is hard...
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An American critic and educator specializing in Renaissance literature, Peterson is the author of The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne (1967). In the following essay, he traces the connection between...
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In the following essay, DeShazer examines the inspiration and defining qualities of Bogan's poetic voice.
"What makes a writer?" Louise Bogan asks in a lecture given at New York U...
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An American critic and educator, Walker is the author of The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (1982), in which she studies verse as an outlet for the anxiety o...
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In the following essay, Aldrich explores Bogan's inability to overcome the notion that a woman's artistic ability is linked to her youthfulness and sexual energy; Aldrich contends that t...
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In the following review, Wolf avers that the language in Body of This Death is often inadequate for the meaning Bogan tries to convey.
Louise Bogan's Body of This Death has more than anything e...
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Winters was a prominent American poet and critic whose works evince his conviction that all good literature necessarily serves a conscious moral purpose. In his first critical study, Primitivism and D...
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Ford was an English literary figure who played an important role in the development of twentieth-century Realistic and Modernist literature and art. In 1908 he founded the English Review, a periodical...
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Deutsch was an American poet, critic, novelist, and translator. Although some critics find her poetry stresses intellect to the detriment of emotion, her work is generally well-received. Deutsch...
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Often considered the poetic successor of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, Auden is also highly regarded for his literary criticism. As a member of a generation of British writers strongly influenced by th...
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In the following excerpt, Deutsch discusses the themes and spirit of Bogan's poetry.
Miss Bogan's themes are the reasons of the heart that reason does not know, the eternal strangeness o...
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An American educator, critic, and poet, Olson is a prominent member of what has been called the neo-Aristotelian school, which emerged at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Members of this group ...
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Dickey is an American poet and critic whose verse is surprisingly varied in mood, voice, and theme, often fluctuating between humorous and serious observations on life. In the following excerpt, he as...
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Tate was an influential American critic who was closely associated with two critical movements, the Agrarians and the New Critics. In the following excerpt, he remarks favorably on The Sleeping Fury, ...
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Maxwell was an American novelist, short story writer, and editor. In the following review of Journey around My Room, a volume edited by Ruth Limmer, he calls Limmer's work "a labor of lo...
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Shaw is an American poet, educator, and editor whose works include The Wonder of Seeing Double (1988). Below, he provides an overview of Journey around My Room, discussing in particular Bogan's...
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Pritchard is an American critic, educator, and editor. In the following positive review of Journey around My Room, he states that "this mosaic … helped me to a sharper sense of how good ...
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In the following essay, Moldaw examines Bogan's aesthetic principles and style.
Like T. S. Eliot, and unlike William Carlos Williams, in answer to whom she wrote the essay "On the Pleasu...
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In the following review of The Blue Estuaries, Dorian discusses themes of anger, fear, and womanhood in Bogan's poetry, arguing that "Bogan chose an archetypal perspective which enabled ...
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In the following excerpt, Frank analyzes the poems collected in Dark Summer.
The poems in Dark Summer are arranged in a loosely chronological sequence. The first section contains poems published for t...
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In the following excerpt, Bowles examines the influence of the Symbolists, the Metaphysicals, W. B. Yeats, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on Bogan's artistic development.
[T]he historical sens...
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Limmer is an editor who compiled Bogan's A Poet's Alphabet and What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920–1970. The following is Bogan's response to a que...
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An Excerpt from Journey Around My Room
What makes a writer? Is it the love of, and devotion to, the actual act of writing that makes a writer? I should say, from my own experience, No. Some of the mo...
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Eberhart was an American poet, playwright, and educator. In the following review of Collected Poems, 1923–53, he praises the depth and forceful emotion of Bogan's work.
Louise Bogan�...
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Untermeyer was an American poet. In the review below, she lauds Selected Criticism.
When one has read through Louise Bogan's Selected Criticism, seventy essays written over a period of twenty-f...
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Ramsey is an American educator, poet, critic, and novelist. In the following essay, he lauds Bogan's achievements as a lyric poet, stating "to say that some of her lyrics will last as lo...
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In the review below, Lask praises A Poet's Alphabet, stating that "for a book of criticism, [Bogan's volume is unusual in the amount of sheer reading pleasure it provides."...
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In the following positive review of A Poet's Alphabet, Morris states that in this critical work Bogan "finds the strengths of her writers and emphasizes these in deft, bright, compact, a...
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Louchheim was an American poet, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following positive review of What the Woman Lived, she comments on Bogan's life and works.
In a letter dated 1939, Louise B...
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Louise Bogan
