Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T08:37:37.442Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Epilogue

Louise Glück’s Secret Conversations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2022

Elizabeth Helsinger
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Get access

Summary

The Epilogue moves forward to consider briefly selected poems from the twentieth century by T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and especially Louise Glück, who in her Nobel prize acceptance speech in December 2020 invoked an earlier tradition of poems that seem to invite the reader into secret conversations. These conversations are not, in fact, so secret, as Conversing in Verse has argued. The poems Glück cites (by Blake, Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot) include voices conversing under difficult conditions – as do her own poems, particularly in two collections, The Wild Iris and Meadowlands. There, as in the poetry that has been the subject of this study, misunderstandings and failed encounters are as frequent as successful ones. Handled with Glück’s ironic, witty self-awareness, they too are desperate conversations – with other people, with an impatient God, or with the nonhuman phenomena of the world. Poetry is after all sociable; it continues, against all odds, to converse.

Type
Chapter
Information
Conversing in Verse
Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry
, pp. 155 - 159
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Epilogue
  • Elizabeth Helsinger, University of Chicago
  • Book: Conversing in Verse
  • Online publication: 21 July 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009200189.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Epilogue
  • Elizabeth Helsinger, University of Chicago
  • Book: Conversing in Verse
  • Online publication: 21 July 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009200189.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Epilogue
  • Elizabeth Helsinger, University of Chicago
  • Book: Conversing in Verse
  • Online publication: 21 July 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009200189.007
Available formats
×