Glück, Louise - Helen Vendler (essay date 1978)

Helen Vendler (essay date 1978)

SOURCE: "The Poetry of Louise Gluck," in The New Republic, Vol. 178, No. 24, June 17, 1978, pp. 34-37.

[Vendler is an American educator and critic specializing in modern poets. Her books include studies of Wallace Stevens, John Keats, and William Butler Yeats, as well as Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (1981). Here, she focuses on Glück's second book, The House on Marshland, analyzing the poet's voice and lyric form. She contends that the separate lyrics in linked structures, as well as Glück's "transparently removed" narrative voice, provide a highly personal and exciting alternative to confessional poetry.]

"All Hallows" appeared on the first page of Louise Glück's The House on Marshland (1975). If there were echoes of Stevens and perhaps of Sexton, they were assimilated into a new voice. "All Hallows" is about bearing a child—or so it seems to me—but it is...

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