Vendler on Glück

Louise Glück (Photo by Webb Chappell)

Dwight Garner, in his “Louise Glück, a Nobel Winner Whose Poems Have Abundant Intellect and Deep Feeling” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 8, 2020), quotes my favorite literary critic, Helen Vendler. He says, “Helen Vendler, writing in The New Republic, said that Glück’s poems ‘have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither “confessional” nor “intellectual” in the usual senses of those words.’ ” The quote is from Vendler’s “Flower Power: Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris” (The New Republic, May 24, 1993; included in Vendler’s 1995 Soul Says). 

Vendler wrote another great New Republic piece on Glück – “The Poetry of Louise Glück” (June 17, 1978; collected in Vendler’s 1980 Part of Nature, Part of Us. In this earlier essay, Vendler says of Glück, “She sees experience from very far off, almost through the wrong end of a telescope.” That strikes me as valid. I find Glück’s poetry remote, detached, cold – far removed from what Tolstoy called “the unconscious swarmlike life of mankind.” But as abstraction, it’s exquisite. For example, “Messengers”:

And the deer—
how beautiful they are,
as though their bodies did not impede them.
Slowly they drift into the open
through bronze panels of the sunlight.