SOURCE: "Knowledge Puffeth Up," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1985, pp. 144-59.

In the following review of The Blue Estuaries, Dorian discusses themes of anger, fear, and womanhood in Bogan's poetry, arguing that "Bogan chose an archetypal perspective which enabled her to circumscribe the demands of narrative, to avoid the culturally accepted gestures of female identity."

For Louise Bogan, writing wove a lifeline, a silver cord between heaven and hell. No longer plucking self-knowledge from the tree, she reached for the branches of song. How difficult that aspiration when one considers how long women have been punished for the theft of an apple, forbidden to write by the demands of silence and mute suffering. Bogan's poetry was intricately laced with this taboo against self-revelation, which she conceived never in didactic or argumentative terms, but as song. In so doing, she broke with one tradition by keeping...