SOURCE: "The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions," in Critical Essays on Louise Bogan, edited by Martha Collins, G. K. Hall & Co., 1984, pp. 49-53.

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 questionnaire that was submitted to a number of American writers; it was originally published in the Partisan Review in Fall 1939. Bogan comments on her writing, literary criticism, and American society.

[Limmer]: Are you conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a "usable past"? Is this mostly American? What figures would you designate as elements in it? Would you say, for example, that Henry James's work is more relevant to the present and future of American writing than Walt Whitman's?

[Bogan]: Because what education I received came from New England schools, before 1916, my usable past has...