SOURCE: "Symbol, Mask, and Meter in the Poetry of Louise Bogan," in Gender and Literary Voice, edited by Janet Todd, Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1980, pp. 67–80.

In the following essay, Moore assesses the relationship between Bogan's feminist views and the verse forms and literary conventions she employed in her poetry.

Styles are symptoms. This is hardly a new idea, of course. Scholars have used this assumption for generations in their studies of painting, music, sculpture, architecture, and literature. But such an assumption is particularly useful in studying women's writing because one of the goals of feminist criticism is to discover what feminist writing is. If a culture denies women an integrated sensibility and forces upon them roles that reduce or ignore their complexity and creativity, how do women express the conflict in their writing?

Susan Juhasz has defined the styles of some contemporary women poets in Naked and Fiery...