Louise Glück Summary

Louise Glück (pronounced Glick) was born in New York City. She attended Sarah Lawrence College in 1962 and Columbia University from 1963 to 1965. She is married to John Dranow, a prose writer and... Read more

Boyers is an American educator and critic whose books include Selected Literary Essays of Robert Boyers (1977). In this review of Firstborn, he praises the craftsmanship of Glück's poetr... Read more

In the following review, Bond critiques Glück's fifth book, noting a shift in her use of mythology that illuminates the process through which myth achieves meaning; he concludes that the... Read more

In this excerpt, McMahon addresses the issue of the aesthetic differences between men and women. Glück's work, the critic finds, often depicts female sexuality and artistic expression to... Read more

Yenser is American poet, educator, and critic. Here, he acknowledges that the fifty-four poems in The Wild Iris generate a complete sequence; nevertheless, he asserts that the use of many voices is a ... Read more

In this review of Meadowlands, Seshadri suggests that Glück's considerable lyric expertise and meticulous craft have been tempered by an earthiness and humor. Even before Louise Gl... Read more

Vendler is an American educator and critic specializing in modern poets. Her books include studies of Wallace Stevens, John Keats, and William Butler Yeats, as well as Part of Nature, Part of Us: Mode... Read more

In the following review of Descending Figure, Bedient discusses themes and techniques that appear in all of Glück's work. The critic finds that Glück's emphasis on the sens... Read more

In this essay, originally published in 1985, Glück elucidates the process through which a poem takes shape out of her ordinary experience. She also discusses particular tasks she has set hersel... Read more

Keller is an educator, a critic and the author of Re-Making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. In the following essay, she adopts a feminist critical perspective on the ... Read more

Critical Essay by Jay Parini Between Firstborn and her new book, Descending Figure, Glück published one other volume, The House on Marshland (1975), a book full of blazing little legends recall... Read more

Critical Essay by J. D. Mcclatchy Descending Figure is a considerable advance on Glück's previous work. It is spare, exact, mysterious; it has a rhetorical elegance and control, and a ne... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Boyers Louise Gluck is an extraordinarily meticulous craftsman whose [Firstborn gives] promise of a really remarkable career. Working with materials associated with the confes... Read more

Critical Essay by Lisel Mueller [In Firstborn, Louise Glück's] poems are brief and terse; her diction is like a clenched fist, or a muscle-cramp. Her poetic world is an externalization o... Read more

Critical Essay by Charles Molesworth Judging from her titles [in "Descending Figure"]—"Dedication to Hunger," "Lamentations," "World Breaking Ap... Read more

Critical Essay by William Doreski Louise Glück's poems remind us that mythmaking is closely related to allegory even when the "thing itself" retains its integrity. The most... Read more

In the following review, Raffel discusses the poetry in Firstborn, The House on Marshland, Descending Figure, and The Triumph of Achilles, focusing on technique and structure. Born in 1943, Louise Gl&... Read more

In the following essay, Longenbach compares Vita Nova with Glück's previous collections, particularly Meadowlands, The Wild Iris, and Ararat. Vita Nova, Louise Glück's eigh... Read more

In the following excerpt, Clark praises Glück's foray into a dreamworld in Vita Nova. “Life is very weird, no matter how it ends, / very filled with dreams.” Poet Louise Gl... Read more

In the following essay, Perryman discusses Glück's rewriting of classic tales, particularly in Meadowlands, and how she has appropriated poetic structures used by modernists such as T. S... Read more

In the following essay, Keller studies the themes of female sexuality and femininity in Firstborn, The House on Marshland, Descending Figure, and The Triumph of Achilles. It is a commonplace of Americ... Read more

In the following essay, Dodd examines the influence of confessional poetry in Firstborn, the archetypal in The House on Marshland, myth and technique in The Triumph of Achilles, and the retreat from p... Read more

In the following positive review, Jansen praises Proofs and Theories, addressing Glück's growth as a poet. Louise Glück presents herself as a reader “speaking to those I ha... Read more

In the following review, Burt compares Glück's poetry in The Wild Iris to the poetry of Sylvia Plath, commenting on the psychological searching in the collection and the focus on spiritu... Read more