SOURCE: "Louise Bogan," in The Nation, New York, Vol. CXVII, No. 3043, October 31, 1923, p. 494.

Van Doren was one of the most prolific men of letters in twentieth-century American writing. His work includes poetry (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940), novels, short stories, drama, criticism, social commentary, and the editing of a number of popular anthologies. He has written accomplished studies of Shakespeare, John Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, and served as the literary editor and film critic for the Nation during the 1920s and 1930s. In the following review, Van Doren praises Body of This Death and remarks on the imagery in the collection.

It is impossible to say what these twenty-seven poems [in Body of This Death] are, and it would be difficult to say what they are like. The temptation is to speak of them only in images, for they are not susceptible...