Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Elizabeth Dodd

Critical Essay by Elizabeth Dodd

SOURCE: Dodd, Elizabeth. “Louise Glück: The Ardent Understatement of Postconfessional Classicism.” In The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H. D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück, pp. 149–96. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992.

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 personal classicism in Ararat.

We have seen three different manifestations of the personal classicist mode undertaken by three very different women. H. D. worked to develop the persona poem as a means to present a palimpsest of personal and mythic experience, and to embed autobiography within a timeless continuum of countless women's experiences. Even while declaring certain subjects taboo for women artists, Louise Bogan tried to perfect the lyric as a modernist form for women, a possibility for understated personal expression in...
(read more)