Glück's work has been the subject of academic study. Her papers, including manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials, are housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.[59]
Form
Glück is best known for lyric poems of linguistic precision and dark tone. The poet Craig Morgan Teicher has described her as a writer for whom "words are always scarce, hard won, and not to be wasted".[60] The scholar Laura Quinney has argued that her careful use of words put Glück into "the line of American poets who value fierce lyric compression", from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop.[61] Glück's poems shifted in form throughout her career, beginning with short, terse lyrics composed of compact lines and expanding into connected book-length sequences.[62] Her work is not known for poetic techniques such as rhyme or alliteration. Rather, the poet Robert Hahn has called her style "radically inconspicuous" or "virtually an absence of style", relying on a voice that blends "portentous intonations" with a conversational approach.[40]
Among scholars and reviewers, there has been discussion as to whether Glück is a confessional poet, owing to the prevalence of the first-person mode in her poems and their intimate subject matter, often inspired by events in Glück's personal life. The scholar Robert Baker has argued that Glück "is surely a confessional poet in some basic sense",[63] while the critic Michael Robbins has argued that Glück's poetry, unlike that of confessional poets Sylvia Plath or John Berryman, "depends upon the fiction of privacy".[64] In other words, she cannot be a confessional poet, Robbins argues, if she does not address an audience. Going further, Quinney argues that, to Glück, the confessional poem is "odious".[61] Others have noted that Glück's poems can be viewed as autobiographical, while her technique of inhabiting various personas, ranging from ancient Greek gods to garden flowers, renders her poems more than mere confessions. As the scholar Helen Vendler has noted: "In their obliquity and reserve, [Glück's poems] offer an alternative to first-person 'confession', while remaining indisputably personal".[65]
Themes
While Glück's work is thematically diverse, scholars and critics have identified several themes that are paramount. Most prominently, Glück's poetry can be said to focus on trauma, as she wrote throughout her career about death, loss, suffering, failed relationships, and attempts at healing and renewal.[66] The scholar Daniel Morris notes that even a Glück poem that uses traditionally happy or idyllic imagery "suggests the author's awareness of mortality, of the loss of innocence".[31] The scholar Joanne Feit Diehl echoes this notion when she argues that "this 'sense of an ending' … infuses Glück's poems with their retrospective power", pointing to her transformation of common objects, such as a baby stroller, into representations of loneliness and loss.[67] Yet, for Glück, trauma was arguably a gateway to a greater appreciation of life, a concept explored in The Triumph of Achilles. The triumph to which the title alludes is Achilles' acceptance of mortality—which enables him to become a more fully realized human being.[68]
Another of Glück's common themes is desire. Glück wrote directly about many forms of desire—for example, the desire for love or insight—but her approach is marked by ambivalence. Morris argues that Glück's poems, which often adopt contradictory points of view, reflect "her own ambivalent relationship to status, power, morality, gender, and, most of all, language".[69] The author Robert Boyer has characterized Glück's ambivalence as a result of "strenuous self-interrogation". He argues that "Glück's poems at their best have always moved between recoil and affirmation, sensuous immediacy and reflection … for a poet who can often seem earthbound and defiantly unillusioned, she has been powerfully responsive to the lure of the daily miracle and the sudden upsurge of overmastering emotion".[70] The tension between competing desires in Glück's work manifests both in her assumption of different personas from poem to poem and in her varied approach to each collection of her poems. This led the poet and scholar James Longenbach to declare that "change is Louise Glück's highest value" and "if change is what she most craves, it is also what she most resists, what is most difficult for her, most hard-won".[71]
Another of Glück's preoccupations was nature, the setting for many of her poems. In The Wild Iris, the poems take place in a garden where flowers have intelligent, emotive voices. However, Morris points out that The House on Marshland is also concerned with nature and can be read as a revision of the Romantic tradition of nature poetry.[72] In Ararat, too, "flowers become a language of mourning", useful for both commemoration and competition among mourners to determine the "ownership of nature as a meaningful system of symbolism".[73] Thus, in Glück's work nature is both something to be regarded critically and embraced. The author and critic Alan Williamson has said it can also sometimes suggest the divine, as when, in the poem "Celestial Music", the speaker states that "when you love the world you hear celestial music", or when, in "The Wild Iris", the deity speaks through changes in weather.[74]
Glück's poetry is also notable for what it avoids. Morris argues that
Glück's writing most often evades ethnic identification, religious classification, or gendered affiliation. In fact, her poetry often negates critical assessments that affirm identity politics as criteria for literary evaluation. She resists canonization as a hyphenated poet (that is, as a "Jewish-American" poet, or a "feminist" poet, or a "nature" poet), preferring instead to retain an aura of iconoclasm, or in-betweenness.[75]
Influences
Glück pointed to the influence of psychoanalysis on her work, as well as her early learning in ancient legends, parables, and mythology. In addition, she credited the influence of Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. Scholars and critics have pointed to the literary influence on her work of Robert Lowell,[76] Rainer Maria Rilke,[64] and Emily Dickinson,[77] among others.
