Louise Bogan

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Bibliography

Knox, Claire E. Louise Bogan: A Reference Source. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1990, 315 p.

Annotated guide to works by and about Bogan.

Biography

Frank, Elizabeth. Louise Bogan: A Portrait. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, 460 p.

Reconstructs the events of Bogan's life while admitting the hurdle posed by the author's privacy; according to Frank, Bogan was "a woman whose passion for reticence bordered on obsession."

Criticism

Bowles, Gloria. Louise Bogan's Aesthetic of Limitation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, 156 p.

Avers that Bogan is a major modernist poet and assesses the limits that she placed upon herself in order to work within the tradition established by male poets.

——. "Louise Bogan: To Be (or Not to Be?) Woman Poet." Women's Studies 5 (1977): 131–35.

Comments on Bogan's poetry with regard to her attitude toward womanhood, which Bowles contends was "full of ambivalence and contradiction."

Collins, Martha, ed. Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1984, 210 p.

Reprints reviews and essays by many noted critics and poets, including Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Rexroth, W. H. Auden, and Marianne Moore.

Dodd, Elizabeth Caroline. "The Knife of the Perfectionist Attitude: Louise Bogan's Poetic Control." In her The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H. D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck, pp. 71–103. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992.

Describes Bogan's verse as "personal classicist," meaning that it retains "elements of lyric romanticism in her continual insistence on emotion as the source for poetry, while adopting elements of control from a classical aesthetic." Dodd maintains that personal classicism enables female poets to overturn the image of women as retiring and self-denying.

Dorian, Donna. "Knowledge Puffeth Up." Parnassus: Poetry in Review 12, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 1985): 144–59.

Notes that Bogan shunned biographical self-revelation in her verse, preferring to explore psychological complexities: "By dramatizing internal conflict she avoided the insipid revelations of an egotistical personality."

Meredith, William. "Poems of a Human Being." The New York Times Book Review (13 October 1968): 4.

States that in The Blue Estuaries, Bogan explores what it means to be a female artist in a patriarchal society.

Muller, John. "Light and the Wisdom of the Dark: Aging and the Language of Desire in the Texts of Louise Bogan." In Memory and Desire: AgingLiteraturePsychoanalysis, edited by Kathleen Woodward and Murray M. Schwartz, pp. 76–96. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Explicates Bogan's view of human desire, relying especially on her poetry for clarification of her position. Muller contends that Bogan depicted desire as a deceptive impulse arising from narcissism and the ego and, furthermore, believed that aging can enable an individual to understand the nature of desire.

Ridgeway, Jacqueline. Louise Bogan. Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1984, 146 p.

Biographical and critical overview of Bogan's career.

Roethke, Theodore. "The Poetry of Louise Bogan." Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review LXVII, No. 10 (Autumn 1960): 13–20.

Identifies Bogan's poetry as outside the tradition of verse by contemporary female poets. Roethke states that her poetry rises above shortcomings typical of verse by women. This commonly cited essay is reprinted in Critical Quarterly, Summer 1961.

Upton, Lee. "The Re-making of a Poet: Louise Bogan." The Centennial Review XXXVI, No. 3 (Fall 1992): 557–72.

Evaluates recent critical assessments of Bogan, claiming that the feminist content of her poetry has been largely misunderstood.

Whittemore, Reed. "The Principles of Louise Bogan and Yvor Winters." The Sewanee Review LXIII, No. 1 (January-March 1955): 161–68.

Asserts that Bogan and Yvor Winters are two poets for whom the '"principal issue' is expression." Contesting more favorable appraisals of Bogan and Winters by other critics, Whittemore contends that "ultimately their poems' most noteworthy element is style rather than substance."

Zabel, Morton Dauwen. "The Flower of the Mind." Poetry: A Magazine of Verse XXV, No. 111 (December 1929): 158–62.

Review of Dark Summer concentrating on Bogan's imagery and symbolism.


Additional coverage of Bogan's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Research: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 73–76, 25–28 (rev. ed.); Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 33; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 4, 39, 46; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 45; and Major 20th-century Writers.

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Criticism