[Pritchard is an American critic, educator, and editor. In the following positive review of Journey around My Room, he states that "this mosaic … helped me to a sharper sense of how good a poet [Bogan] could be."]

For years the name Louise Bogan meant for me an accomplished minor poet who did lots of reviewing for The New Yorker; then in 1973, three years after her death, her literary executor and friend, Ruth Limmer, brought out a volume of her letters, [Journey Around My Room] sensitively edited and introduced. No one could read these through without realizing that Bogan was an extraordinary person, altogether larger in wit, anger, passion, contempt for stupidities and proud reticence than one had gathered from the poems alone. This is exactly how she insisted that it be, for as she remarks here, "open confession for certain temperaments (certainly for my own), is not good for the soul, in any direct way." She was also suspicious of journal-keeping, in which the tendency toward "self-regarding emotion … can become overwhelming." It was her belief that "the poet represses the outgoing narrative of his life," and that this repressed material becomes the poem.

Given these strongly held principles, how could she have written an autobiography? The answer is that in fact she didn't, and that what Ruth Limmer has given us in this extremely interesting, often moving book, is a "mosaic" assembled by her from pieces of Louise Bogan's journals, poems, bits of criticism and letters, notebook entries and other fugitive expressions. A perilous enterprise, when the subject in question was such a finished, even austere craftsman, and my guess is that she would have been shocked, could she have read this book, into asking: Is it me? Is it Art? A reader will pass on the first question, but answer the second one in the affirmative. So we stand in Ruth Limmer's debt for this piece of imaginative construction. The first (and most absorbing) part of the book consists of childhood recollections—moody, evocative renderings of growing up in Ballardville, Mass. (near Lowell). Here Bogan's voice is absorbed in remembering: "The whole town, late in October, felt the cold coming on; in bleak afternoon the lights came out early in the frame houses; lights showed clearly across the river in the chill dusk in houses and in the mill. Everyone knew what he had to face."

There is the pleasure in clearly naming the elements of Mrs. Gardner's kitchen, in a house where Louise and her parents first boarded when they moved to Ballardville: "black iron pans and black tin bread pans; a kettle; a double boiler; a roaster; a big, yellow mixing bowl; custard cups; pie tins; a cookie jar…. And I can taste the food: Pot roast with raisins in the sauce; hot biscuits; oatmeal with cream; sliced oranges; broiled fish with slices of lemon and cut-up parsley on top, with browned butter round it. Roast pork; fried potatoes; baked tomatoes…." There are especially vivid portraits of her mother as she cuts apples, or sews, or prepares the house against a hot New England summer day: "The parlor shutters were closed; the inner blinds, behind the long loose curtains, which descended from the tops of the window to the floor (where they lay in brushed-aside folds), were pulled down tightly to the sills. All over the house, the blinds were down." One has similar memories, and Bogan's deliberate, attentive prose startles them into life.

"Why do I remember this house as the happiest of my life?" she asks, adding that she was never really happy there. But it was there that she began to read, thus both combating and deepening the isolation she felt, an isolation that pervades these reflections. For she was, in her word, a "Mick" and a Roman Catholic whose escape from the faith seems to have been prompted by the determination to live her life "without the need of philosophy" and to write poetry which "must deal with that self which man has not made, but been presented with." As much as any poet writing in this century, she had a mind that remained unviolated by ideas, of self or world reform. Like Frost, she was less interested in making the world better than in rendering it in verse, with all its evils and imperfections.

Ruth Limmer's preface is disarming in that she admits that Journey Around My Room is surely not the book Bogan would have written had she chosen to, pointing out further that whatever distortion there is in it lies in its relative absence of humor. One feels this absence especially on turning back to the letters (What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan 1920–1970, ed. Ruth Limmer), so full of tough-minded, healthily sardonic observations, such as her description of Thomas Mann at Princeton ("gives me a pain—I always said his eyes were too near together") or Anaïs Nin ("this totally humorless dame"). I do think that in dividing up the book into 15 chapters, each one headed by a line from a rather feeble Bogan poem called "Train Song"—"Back through clouds / Back through clearing / Back through distance / Back through silence," and so forth—the editor has stage-managed (Ruth Limmer's own term for her editorial role) her subject into an ethereal and portentous figure whom the humorous Bogan, for all her depressions, would have shrunk from.

Louise Bogan wanted her poetry to stand alone, free from the facts of her biography though deeply informed by them. But this mosaic, in some of its juxtapositions of prose and poems, helped me to a sharper sense of how good a poet she could be. At one point she writes about the nostalgia connected with hearing music on the water, or band concerts, or piano music "played however inexpertly, along some city street." The editor puts next to these thoughts a lovely poem which, by virtue of its placement, I truly heard for the first time

      Beautiful, my delight,
      Pass, as we pass the wave.
      Pass, as the mottled night
      Leaves what it cannot save,
      Scattering dark and bright.
 
      Beautiful, pass and be
      Less than the guiltless shade
      To which our vows were said;
      Less than the sound of the oar
      To which our vows were made,
 
        —
 
      Less than the sound of its blade
      Dipping the stream once more.

"I STILL THINK POETRY HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE IMAGINATION. I STILL THINK IT OUGHT TO BE WELL WRITTEN. I STILL THINK IT IS PRIVATE FEELING, NOT PUBLIC SPEECH," she wrote to Rolfe Humphries in 1938. In a poem such as "To Be Sung on the Water," there was nothing desired or promised that she didn't perform.