[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, commenting in particular on Bogan's poetic control and craftsmanship.]

Miss Louise Bogan has published three books, and with each book she has been getting a little better, until now, in the three or four best poems of The Sleeping Fury, she has no superior within her purpose and range: among the women poets of our time she has a single peer, Miss Léonie Adams. Neither Miss Bogan nor Miss Adams will ever have the popular following of Miss [Edna St. Vincent] Millay or even of the late Elinor Wylie. I do not mean to detract from these latter poets; they are technically proficient, they are serious, and they deserve their reputations. Miss Bogan and Miss Adams deserve still greater reputations, but they will not get them in our time because they are "purer" poets than Miss Millay and Mrs. Wylie. They are purer because their work is less involved in the moral and stylistic fashions of the age, and they efface themselves; whereas Miss Millay never lets us forget her "advanced" point of view, nor Mrs. Wylie her interesting personality.

This refusal to take advantage of the traditional privilege of her sex must in part explain Miss Bogan's small production and the concentrated attention that she gives to the detail of her work. Women, I suppose, are fastidious, but many women poets are fastidious in their verse only as a way of being finical about themselves. But Miss Bogan is a craftsman in the masculine mode.

In addition to distinguished diction and a fine ear for the phrase-rhythm she has mastered a prosody that permits her to get the greatest effect out of the slightest variation of stress.

        In the cold heart, as on a page,
        Spell out the gentle syllable
        That puts short limit to your rage
        And curdles the straight fire of hell,
        Compassing all, so all is well.

There is nothing flashy about it; it is finely modulated; and I think one needs only to contrast Miss Bogan's control of her imagery in this stanza, the toning down of the metaphor to the simple last line, with the metaphorical juggernaut to which Miss Field's muse has tied herself, to see the fundamental difference between mastery of an artistic medium and mere undisciplined talent. Miss Bogan reaches the height of her talent in "Hence-forth, from the Mind," surely one of the finest lyrics of our time. The "idea" of the poem is the gradual fading away of earthly joy upon the approach of age—one of the stock themes of English poetry; and Miss Bogan presents it with all the freshness of an Elizabethan lyricist. I quote the two last stanzas:

       Henceforth, from the shell,
       Wherein you heard, and wondered
       At oceans like a bell
       So far from ocean sundered—
       A smothered sound that sleeps
       Long lost within lost deeps,
       Will chime you change and hours,
       The shadow of increase,
       Will sound you flowers
       Born under troubled peace—
       Henceforth, henceforth
       Will echo sea and earth.

This poem represents the best phase of Miss Bogan's work: it goes back to an early piece that has been neglected by readers and reviewers alike—"The Mark"—and these two poems would alone entitle Miss Bogan to the consideration of the coming age.

But there is an unsatisfactory side to Miss Bogan's verse, and it may be briefly indicated by pointing out that the peculiar merits of "The Mark" and "Henceforth, from the Mind" seem to lie in a strict observance of certain limitations: in these poems and of course in others, Miss Bogan is impersonal and dramatic. In "The Sleeping Fury" she is philosophical and divinatory; in "Hypocrite Swift" she merely adumbrates an obscure dramatic situation in a half lyrical, half eighteenth-century, satirical style. Neither of these poems is successful, and the failure can be traced to all levels of the performances; for example, to the prosody, which has little relation to the development of the matter and which merely offers us a few clever local effects.