"Louise Glück and the Return of the Lyric: Rethinking Performativity of One

“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, this book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, the book illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. The book investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. It shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, this book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.

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On Louise Gluck

10.3998/mpub.94851 ◽

2005 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Keyword(s):

Louise Gluck

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“Epitaph, the Idiom of Man”

10.5422/fordham/9780823294626.003.0009 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 177-198

Author(s):

Kevin Ohi

Keyword(s):

Paradise Lost ◽

Human Speech ◽

The Tempest ◽

Louise Gluck

This chapter explores the intertwined power and impotence of human speech, starting from Eudora Welty’s story “Circe.” In “torment,” Circe seeks the secret of human grief; immortal, she finds that her words cannot reach the metaphors to which mortal speech has access. To explore this “frailty,” the chapter traces a passage from Ovid as it is cited by Shakespeare in The Tempest, Milton in Paradise Lost (at the crucial moment of Adam’s telling of his awakening into life), and then Wordsworth in the Immortality Ode. A layered confession of powerlessness is also, in each instance, an invocation of poetic power. The chapter isolates a particular phrase in Wordsworth as an index of its paradoxical formulation of the power of human frailty—“there is” of poetic positing—and then traces some of its appearances in elegiac poetry to link positing to “frailty”: in George Oppen’s “The Image of the Engine,” read as a rewriting of the Immortality Ode, and, briefly, in short poems by Mark Strand and Louise Glück. The chapter concludes by turning to the abyssal consideration of positing in a more monumental work in a different genre, albeit still in elegy: Gertrude’s speech announcing Ophelia’s death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

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