[In the review below, Lask praises A Poet's Alphabet, stating that "for a book of criticism, [Bogan's] volume is unusual in the amount of sheer reading pleasure it provides."]

Louise Bogan's critical pieces [in A Poet's Alphabet] come to us almost as from another age. Not that her subjects are dated. The list of poets reviewed could not be more contemporary. But her tone of civilized inquiry, her judgment that was both detached and involved, the complete absence of trivia and small talk and her desire only to engage the work at hand make her appear a sport in these days of ego-bruising and assertive journalism. She is kind but sharp eyed, soft spoken but penetrating, sympathetic but not fooled. Though her tastes and values are stamped on every page, she never intrudes in person—remarkable in a book of this length. I cannot imagine any poet no matter how severely handled (Peter Viereck for example), grumbling at her criticism, for she is so obviously concerned with the art and craft of the maker.

As a critic, Miss Bogan, who died this year, took a median position between the New Criticism at one end and sociological (or Marxian) criticism at the other. She refused to identify the poet with the historical processes of his age, though she did admit that such narrow readings had their validity. On the other hand, she was not willing to strip the work down to its formal elements only, as if the poet was a disembodied muse living in no fixed time or place and without those idiosyncracies that made him what he was and no other. There is also little poking around in myth or in depth psychology.

But she was minutely aware of the poet's relation to the poetic currents of his time: what he had learned from others, how much he was alike, how he differed from them. She was automatically conscious of the technical finish of the poetry she was reading. Above all she was attuned to the emotional climate in which the poet wrote and the impact he made on the reader. A distinguished poet herself, she was rare in that she participated in the esthetic experience from the other end as a reader, a perceiver. Not so profound perhaps as other critics, she was most useful to that man, who, not without resources of his own, still needed some indication as to where to begin.

Her manner was so quiet, her style so unemphatic that they sometimes obscured the force of her judgments, I doubt whether a more pithy statement of Auden's spiritual development (up to that time) could have been framed than the one she penned in 1944. In a brief piece written in 1957, she pointed out how so much experimental writing 'becomes formula ridden and a victim of its own conventions. A book could be written (and perhaps already has) on her obiter dictum that Yeats and Pound achieved modernity but that Eliot was modern from the start. And in dealing with the French poet Paul Eluard, who was esthetically a surrealist and politically a communist, she touched the exposed nerve of a whole generation of writers who embraced a dogma that was completely inimical to their poetic faith.

She could be wrong and she could be disappointing in her pieces, which is to say that she was mortal. An exquisite and scrupulous craftsman with a leaning to order, she had a natural tendency to respond to formal workmanship, and though she was always fair, she was not always cordial to those who liked to call William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson master. Thus I think she missed the boat in evaluating Donald Allen's significant anthology The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, which was at once a survey of the situation in poetry and a rallying cry to the young.

Offended by the raucous element in the book and by a quality that was raw and unfinished, she felt that the "art of language" could easily disappear under the onslaughts of the untutored, and therefore failed to understand the great appeal such poetry had for many youngsters. Since she herself had no trouble in recognizing what was quick and alive in formal writing, she could not understand the distaste of those who saw academic verse as a wasteland of dried-out forms and brittle language.

And because in writing for magazines, her reviews had to be short, they sometimes raised expectations she did not fulfill. Her succinct piece on John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs had the poet all set up for a devastating knockout punch, when lo! the review ended.

If this notice has concentrated on her poetry reviews, it is due in part to personal preference, in part to the amount of space they occupy in the book. However, she brought the same qualities of knowledge and insight to her reviews of fiction and criticism. The shortcomings and strengths of R. P. Blackmur, for example, are summed up precisely and accurately in the smallest possible space. Her longer pieces on Dorothy Richardson and Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale must have restored those books and authors to a new generation. Her comments on French writing throughout shows her deep understanding of that nation's culture.

For a book of criticism, her volume is unusual in the amount of sheer reading pleasure it provides.