Further Reading
- Bowles, Gloria, "Louise Bogan: To Be (or Not To Be?) Woman Poet," Women's Studies 5 (1977): 131-35. (Argues that Bogan's criticism, letters, and poetry evince an ambivalent and contradictory attitude toward womanhood.)
- 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.)
- Ciardi, John, "Two Nuns and a Strolling Player," The Nation, New York, 178, No. 21 (22 May 1954): 445-46. (Favorably reviews Bogan's Collected Poems, 1923–53 and remarks on works by Leonie Adams and Edna St. Vincent Millay.)
- Collins, Martha, ed., Critical Essays on Louise Bogan. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1984, 210 p. (Reprints numerous reviews and essays on Bogan's works by prominent critics and scholars, including Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Rexroth, W. H. Auden, and Marianne Moore.)
- Dodd, Elizabeth, "The Knife of the Perfectionist Attitude," in The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H. D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück, pp. 71-103. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. (Discusses the aesthetics of Bogan's poetry. Dodd contends that Bogan considered emotion the source of poetry and combined "a personal classicism" with "elements of lyric romanticism.")
- 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.")
- Engels, Vincent, "A Memorable Poetry Year," The Commonweal XI, No. 2 (13 November 1929): 53-5. (Favorably reviews Dark Summer, praising Bogan's sparse language.)
- 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.")
- 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.)
- 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.)
- Moses, W. R., A review of Poems and New Poems, by Louise Bogan, Accent II, No. 2 (Winter 1942): 120-21. (Contends that Bogan's poetry possesses a precision and purity that sets it above the work of her contemporaries.)
- 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: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis, 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.)
- Nicholl, Louise Townsend, "Louise Bogan's Book," The Measure: A Journal of Poetry 32 (October 1923): 15-9. (Laudatory review of Body of This Death.)
- Rexroth, Kenneth, "Among the Best Women Poets Writing Now in America," New York Herald Tribune Book Review 30, No. 47 (4 July 1954): 5. (Reviews Bogan's Collected Poems, 1923–53, along with works by Babette Deutsch and Leonie Adams. Rexroth argues that Bogan's poetry "handles and judges life in real terms" and that her words "seize the mind.")
- Ridgeway, Jacqueline, Louise Bogan. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984, 146 p. (Surveys Bogan's career with individual chapters devoted to each major collection.)
- 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. (Remarks on Bogan's critical reception and concludes that Bogan's poetry "will continue to be read—perhaps even more so as we come to recognize the ways that her poetry explores the unconscious dynamics of women's experience.")
- Whittemore, Reed, "The Principles of Louise Bogan and Yvor Winters," The Sewanee Review LXIII, No. 1 (January-March 1955): 161-68. (Compares the poetry of Bogan and Winters, concluding 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.)
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