[In the following positive review of A Poet's Alphabet, Morris states that in this critical work Bogan "finds the strengths of her writers and emphasizes these in deft, bright, compact, and perceptive analyses."]

Louise Bogan is a poet who generates affectionate approval. Somewhat the same as for Caroline Gordon among the novelists, the feeling pervades that Miss Bogan never received the recognition due her work; and those who write about her verse go extra weight to correct the imbalance. I think especially of Paul Ramsey's loving essay which begins, "Louise Bogan is a great lyric poet," and ends, "To say that some of her lyrics will last as long as English is spoken is to say too little." On the face of it, Mr. Ramsey would seem to have gone too far, and I believe he has; but I am willing to make the same mistake about her reviews and criticism.

A Poet's Alphabet is a delight to read. The arrangement takes us from Auden to Yeats, from American Literature to the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The dates of composition take us from 1923 to 1969, the year before Miss Bogan's death in February, 1970. The chief experience one undergoes in A Poet's Alphabet is admiration for Miss Bogan's generosity, which however is bestowed never at the expense of truth. Miss Bogan finds the strengths of her writers and emphasizes these in deft, bright, compact, and perceptive analyses. It is instructive to any critic or reviewer that Miss Bogan, in assessing the work of over 120 authors, approves (my count was casual) a round 100. Therefore it is easier to list the writers who come short. Max Eastman, Louis Untermeyer, John Berryman, Peter Viereck, Robinson Jeffers, Archibald MacLeish, Horace Gregory, Randall Jarrell, Karl Shapiro, Stephen Spender, Sandra Hochman, Edith Wharton, Katherine Hoskins, John Ashbery, and John Hollander come in for greater or lesser disapproval, although, in her kindness, Miss Bogan almost never is negative completely. Some of these censured are admired elsewhere in her reviews (often as translators).

The alphabetic arrangement of the book has its great advantage for the reader who prefers to use it as a guide to the poets of his interest; but for the reader who would learn something of Louise Bogan, it has its drawbacks. To submit to alphabet is to neglect chronology. We cannot follow Miss Bogan's changing tastes when essays under A are often those written in the 'forties,' fifties, and 'sixties, whereas her first piece (1923) does not appear until L. To get her next ten pieces in order disorders the alphabet as follows: SCPCAHEJOS.

It may be a mistake also (of the editors, not of Miss Bogan) that Miss Bogan's obituary is reprinted from the New Yorker, where we learn that the reviewer's first piece in that magazine appeared March 21, 1931, and her last December 28, 1968; for the reader will look in vain for a piece from either of those years. In general, the scholarship of the editors is casual. We wonder which pieces come from the New Yorker and which from other sources; nor does the acknowledgments page help, for it fails to account for several essays, most notably the last piece she wrote: the essay on Pablo Neruda (1969). Nevertheless, the book is handsomely printed and generally well-edited for a trade edition.

If we take the trouble to read through a second time, following the years rather than the alphabet, we can discover Miss Bogan's development well enough. Evidence of a certain conservatism is found frequently in the early materials: "the experimental side of literature must adjust itself to 'reality' and to the changes in the human situation. Without abolishing a continued 'openness' toward experiment, writers must not insist upon a stubborn avant-gardism when no real need for a further restless forward movement any longer exists" (1950). In her reviews of the 'fifties and 'sixties, Miss Bogan appears to have come to some terms with the experimentalists and vers librists, whom for a long time she held off: "Here, watching a cultivated sense of tradition through modern attitudes and techniques, we sense the possibility of a new reconciliation in modern verse, for so long filled with division and dissent" (1954). Yet her need of form dies hard. One of the longer essays in her book is a defense of formal poetry under the guise of espousing its delights: "formal art—art in which the great tradition is still alive and by which it functions—is as modern as this moment…. This is the formal art fragments of which we should not only as readers 'shore against our ruins,' but keep as a directing influence in whatever we manage to build—to create" (1953).

Of the very great writers, Miss Bogan calls Yeats (during his lifetime) "the greatest poet writing in English" and says of Eliot that "The Collected Poems are more than a work of poetic creation; they are a work of poetic regeneration" (1936). On Frost Miss Bogan gives balanced and honorable judgment of considerable perception, recognizing the poet as self-limited, but within those limits capable of a "masterful ordering of experience" when well into his old age, years in which so many poets decline. On Pound Miss Bogan arrived in 1955 where so many of us have wound up more recently: "The actual form of the Cantos … now seems slightly fossilized—worthy of note as origin and process but with no truly invigorating aspects."

Perhaps the service that Miss Bogan has done for letters during her life is discernible best in her constant approval of the significant literary movements on the continent and her vigorous support of translation as a means of making available, no matter how imperfectly, the thought of the influential cultures of France, Germany, Spain, and to a lesser extent of modern Greece and the Orient.