Louise Bogan Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Gloria Bowles

SOURCE: "The Authority of Male Tradition," in Louise Bogan's Aesthetic of Limitation, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 19-33.

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 sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

            —T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

May a poet write as a poet or must he write as a period?

         —Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry

I have been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us …

                    —Virginia Woolf, Diary

[T]hose women artists esteemed by men are...
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