Versions of Ascesis in Louise Glück’s Poetry

The idea of confessional poetry has perhaps lost specificity, given that so much poetry in our time is at least quasi-confessional, but Louise Glück is surely a confessional poet in some basic sense. She returns time and again to a series of wounding predicaments in her intimate life: the sorrows of family (the family of her childhood as well as the family of her adulthood), the costs of a longing for independence lived primarily as a stance of opposition, or the tension between a longing for independence and a longing for relationship, and an intuition that the core of human experience is loss, grief, and...