Introduction & Overview of The Mystery by Louise Glück

The Mystery Introduction

To appreciate fully the meaning of and drive behind Louise Glück's "The Mystery," it is helpful to read the entire collection, Vita Nova, in which this poem is included. Published in 1999, Vita Nova, which translates into "new life," explores the poet's emergence from the despair and loneliness that plagued her for years after her husband left her. Her previous collection, Meadowlands (1996), recounted the deterioration of her marriage and Vita Nova picks up where that book left off: Glück's life after divorce, drawing from a mixture of allusions to distraught lovers in Greek mythology and to her own plight as a rejected, sometimes self-pitying, woman. But "The Mystery" can be read and enjoyed as a single poem as well, and it stands on its own as an uplifting testimony to spiritual, emotional, and intellectual rebirth.

Perhaps uncharacteristically for Glück, this poem's extended metaphor is based on mystery writer...
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