SOURCE: "The Poetry of Louise Bogan," in The Southern Review, Louisiana State University, Vol. 19, No. 1, January, 1983, pp. 73–87.

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 the themes and formal aspects of Bogan's verse.

In the years following the publication of Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923–68 Louise Bogan has been all but forgotten. The reasons are obvious enough. She was a formalist during a time when the main lines of development in American poetry were radically experimental. There is little evidence in her verse to indicate that she was much interested in Imagism or the experimental techniques of Pound, Eliot, and Williams, or that she found much that was useful to her in the works of the Symbolists. She was a poet who relied mainly on the old modes...