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 added a dozen or more to our small stock of memorable lyrics. She has added nothing whatever to our inexhaustible store of trash." Bogan's reputation as a poet is secure on exactly that scale. She is remembered and studied as one of the finest lyric poets America has produced, though the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending. Her achievement in poetry has also been overshadowed by her extensive critical writings; for thirty-eight years she was the poetry critic for The New Yorker magazine, the arbiter of taste in such matters for...