Louise Glück's “I”
Authors: Halpern Nick 
Published: January 2006

This article is one of three presented as a panel at the 2005 MLA Convention in Philadelphia (with poet Karl Kirchwey of Bryn Mawr College as panel chair and commentator):

“Are You Talking to Me?”: Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris

– Willard Spiegelman, Southern Methodist University

“I’ll tell you something”: Reader‐Address in Louise Glück's Ararat Sequence

– Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College

Louise Glück's “I”

– Nick Halpern, North Carolina State University

Jane Hedley here introduces the three papers for Literature Compass. The full text of Nick Halpern's MLA paper itself follows this introduction:

Lyric Utterance and the Reader: Overheard, Performed, or Addressed?

In the first line of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who is being addressed? “Let us go then, you and I”: is Prufrock talking to himself, and has Eliot thereby put the poem's readers in a position to “overhear” an inner monologue? Is “Let us go then” addressed directly to the poem's hypocrite lecteur, who is presupposed to be the secret sharer of Prufrock's emotional paralysis? Or has the reader been offered the opportunity to step into the “I”‐position and become, for the duration of the poem, the sort of man who would have this conversation with himself?

All three ways of conceiving of lyric utterance, and of what Northrop Frye terms its “radical of presentation,” are concurrent among us, and the question of lyric address is one that is undergoing reconsideration in a number of critical and scholarly venues at the present time. William Waters chaired Special Sessions on poetry's “you” for three years running at the MLA convention, beginning in 1999. Recently published books and articles from Charles Altieri, Sarah Zimmerman, and Virginia Jackson have revisited the rhetoric of Romanticism from the standpoint of how the reader is implicated and/or addressed. In “Lyric Possession,” Susan Stewart's 1995 essay for Critical Inquiry, the problematic of lyric address is given a memorably postmodern formulation with her suggestion that “when speakers speak from the position of listeners, when though is unattributable and intention wayward, the situation of poetry is evoked.”

The conception of lyric utterance that was “canonized” by both Northrop Frye, in the Anatomy of Criticism, and T. S. Eliot, in The Three Voices of Poetry, is that the lyric is pre‐eminently and distinctively the genre of self‐communion. Paul De Man, Jonathan Culler, and Barbara Johnson are furthering this conception when they cite “apostrophe” as the rhetorical device that is generically constitutive of the lyric: by addressing himself to the west wind or to the sister who is also his soul mate, the lyric poet is turning away from the poem's readers the better to bring a distinctively lyric “self” into focus. W. R. Johnson has argued, contra Frye and Eliot, De Man and Culler, that the Romantic “meditative” lyric was a local aberration from the central tradition of the lyric; according to Johnson, and more recently William Waters, the lyric speaker and his hypothetical reader are always more or less explicitly in dialogue. Helen Vendler has meanwhile urged us toward yet a third conception of how the lyric engages its readers. Lyrics offer themselves to us, according to Vendler, as scripts for performance: “a lyric is meant to be spoken by the reader as if the reader were the one uttering the words.” In these three position‐pieces Willard Spiegelman, Jane Hedley, and Nick Halpern have undertaken to stage the conflict between these three differing approaches to the lyric. Their underlying premise is that it does matter which approach we take, but that none of them is simply mistaken – each has its uses.

Louise Glück is a poet who has gone on record as preferring to read and write poetry that “requests or craves a listener”; but is the listener she envisions an overhearer, an interlocutor, or an alter ego who listens in order to transform himself into the speaker of her poems? Nick Halpern's essay on Glück's Pulitzer Prize‐winning volume The Wild Iris (1992) takes its departure from the traditional conception of lyric utterance as an interpersonal drama whose “persons” are all internal to the poem. Jane Hedley uses Glück's 1990 volume Ararat to argue that Glück is choosing to address the listener she craves directly, a choice that has rhetorical and characterological implications which will fail to emerge if we assume we are supposed to “overhear” her poems. Nick Halpern uses Glück's 1996 volume Meadowlands to enact the claim that poems are neither overheard nor addressed to their readers, but challenge us to inhabit a process of thought and feeling the poem has scripted. According to Halpern we neither hear Glück out, as Hedley would have it, nor do we overhear her, as Spiegelman supposes: instead, we are called upon to become her.

Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College