SOURCE: "Louise Bogan and Léonie Adams," in On Value Judgments in the Arts, and Other Essays, The University of Chicago Press, 1976, pp. 36–49.

An American educator, critic, and poet, Olson is a prominent member of what has been called the neo-Aristotelian school, which emerged at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Members of this group share the belief that the principles set down by Aristotle in his Poetics can be applied to contemporary literature, thereby allowing a critic to determine the composite effect of a literary work through analysis of its differentiable artistic parts such as plot, character, thought, diction. In the following excerpt from an essay that was originally published in 1954 in the Chicago Review, Olson asserts that Bogan successfully conveys emotion through compact, unadorned verse.

The greater part of Miss Bogan's poems [in Collected Poems: 1923–1953] deal with the experiences of love; love, that is, as...