In 1970, at a memorial service for Louise Bogan, W.H. Auden identified what he thought to be the most enduring qualities of her lyric poetry: "aside from their technical excellence, [what] is most impressive about her poems is the unflinching courage with which she faced her problems, and her determination never to surrender to self-pity, but to wrest beauty and joy out of dark places." Auden had first met Bogan in 1941 when she was well established as a critic of poetry at the New Yorker and had already written four of the six books of verse on which her reputation as one of America's finest lyric poets was to rest. For almost thirty years, he had watched the unfolding of a talent. His appreciation of her gifts as poet, essayist, fiction writer, and autobiographer was shared by many of Bogan's friends, who also saw the violence of feeling...