SOURCE: "Women and the Retreat to the Mind: Louise Bogan and the Stoic Persona," in Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets, Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 165–90.

An American critic and educator, Walker is the author of The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (1982), in which she studies verse as an outlet for the anxiety of women coping in "a predominantly masculine culture. " in the following excerpt, Walker addresses Bogan's use of an intellectually detached, stoic persona in her verse as a guard against emotional vulnerability.

"Henceforth, from the mind," wrote Louise Bogan in the early 1930s, "For your whole joy, must spring / Such joy as you may find / In any earthly thing" [The Blue Estuaries, 1977]. The difference from Millay's typical embodiment of desire is striking. For Bogan, as for Elinor Wylie and H. D., a retreat to the mind, not some...