Gluck’s Poetry

The poet Louise Glück has said that she feels comfortable writing within a tradition often characterized as belonging only to male poets. About her own experience reading poetry, Glück notes that her gender did not keep her from appreciating the poems of Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, and other male poets. Rather she believed tradition as historically exclusionary and rhetorically inadequate for women, Glück embraces it with respect and admiration.

Glück’s formative encounters with poetry also provided her with the theoretical underpinnings of her respect for this tradition; she notes that in her youth she could sense many of the great themes and subjects of poetry even before experiencing them in her own life. These subjects—loss, the passage of time, desire—are timeless, mortality, for example, then issues of gender distinction fade behind the presence of this universal reality.

Some of Glück’s critics claim that this idea of the universal is suspect and that the idea that gender issues are transcended by addressing certain subjects may attribute to poetry an innocence that it does not have. They maintain that a female poet writing within a historically male-dominated tradition will on some strive to create a uniquely female poetry by using new forms to develop a new voice.

Glück, however, observes that this ambition, with its insistence on an essentially female perspective, is as limiting as her critics believe the historically male-dominated tradition to be. She holds that to the extent that there are some gender differences that have been shaped by history, they will emerge in the differing ways what it includes and in what it omits, inevitably speaks of its social and historical context.