SOURCE: '"Free / of Blossom and Subterfuge': Louise Glück and the Language of Renunciation," in World, Self, Poem: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from the "Jubilation of Poets," edited by Leonard M. Trawick, Kent State University Press, 1990, pp. 120-29.

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 negative treatment of the female in Glück's first four books. The critic analyzes the relationship of the role of woman and that of poet and finds that, for the most part, Glück views the two as mutually exclusive.

It is a commonplace of American feminist criticism that, historically, linkage of the words woman and poet has yielded a powerful contradiction in terms, inevitably confronted by women attempting verse. Because those aspiring to the male status...