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Louise Glück’s Secret Conversations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2022
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.
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