SOURCE: Greenberg, Arielle. “A Sublime Sort of Exercise: Levity and the Poetry of Barbara Guest.” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30 (2001): 111-21.

In the following essay, Greenberg traces the evolution of humor and wit in Guest's poetry from 1960 through 1980.

Much of the recent critical work on Barbara Guest has focused on the importance of painterly light in her poems. I would like to discuss the importance of a different kind of light—light in the sense of levity, humor. I would ask that we read Guest as a poet possessed of great wit, and as a poet employing feminist strategies. I argue that these two characteristics can be seen as intrinsically linked.

This essay charts a trajectory in Guest's work from 1960 through 1980—from Poems (1962), The Blue Stairs (1968), The Countess from Minneapolis (1976), to The Türler Losses (1979)—and argues that her use of wit over those two decades parallels a...