SOURCE: Upton, Lee. “Fleshless Voices: Louise Glück's Rituals of Abjection and Oblivion.” In The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets, pp. 119–43. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Upton discusses how Glück's poetry, particularly Meadowlands, addresses such themes as birth and death, the body and reproduction, children, distrust of the sensual, and generational cycles.

Louise Glück's poetry travels over ancient ground in the Western tradition. Yet while her means are in some ways traditional—the adoption of the lyric voice and august themes of nature, mortality, and women's abandonment by lovers—the conceptual value of her poetry is provocative. Her speakers insinuate a wrong not allied so much to individual circumstance (circumstance seeming too easily assumed for Glück, most notably causal circumstance) as to what are posed as ineradicable laws of nature and being. Since her early career Gl...