[1] Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier described her as "one of the finest lyric poets America has produced."

He said, "the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending.

[6] Not only was it difficult being a female poet in the 1930s and 1940s, but her lower-middle-class Irish background and limited education also brought on much ambivalence and contradiction for Louise Bogan.

In a letter to Edmund Wilson, she detailed a raucous affair that she and the yet-unpublished Roethke carried on in 1935, during the time between his expulsion from Lafayette College and his return to Michigan.

At the time she seemed little impressed by what she called his "very, very small lyrics"; she seems to have viewed the affair as, at most, a possible source for her own work (see What the Woman Lived: Collected letters of Louise Bogan).

"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!"

– Louise Bogan Though open to interpretation, "Medusa" is a poem that revolves around the petrification of the speaker who contemplates the concept of time.

"[1] At a time where she most likely felt betrayed by her husband and society, Bogan feels like the speaker in "Medusa", stuck in a dead scene where her eyes could no longer drift away to a better life.