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This chapter turns to a poet whose work lies at the opposite end of the spectrum, in several respects, from Ashbery's. Here, the chapter focuses on first books to consider subsequent volumes from Louise Glück's oeuvre. The differences between Ashbery and Glück are meant to stress the pervasiveness of the fascination with the vocational trajectory that they share: the same conflicted embrace of career is as legible in the serene disorders of Some Trees as it is in the fierce analyses of Firstborn and throughout the seven collections Glück published leading up to Vita Nova. The logic of Glück's career, the chapter argues, illustrates the double bind of literary professionalism with radical severity.

This chapter analyses American poets' new collection, Louise Glück's The Seven Ages and Jorie Graham's Never. Glück has remained faithful simultaneously to individuality and ordinary experience and this double goal affects her subjects and the size of her poems. Graham has always been inclined toward the epistemological dilemmas plumbed and articulated by the English Romantics and in her new volume she revisits Wordsworthian scenes of childhood to develop her ongoing lyrical autobiography with reference to what the Romantics called spots of time.

Louise Glück is the author of ten books of poetry, including Firstborn (1968) and Averno (2006), and a book of essays, Proofs and Theories (1995). Her most recent books, such as Meadowlands and Averno, show Glück as amply social, funny, and tender as often as she is stern, dispassionate, and ironic. This broader affective range is the result, as this chapter argues, of her interest in narrative. The opportunities presented by telling stories—and the frustrations with having stories told about her—have become central concerns for Glück. No living poet has made lyric poetry answer so fruitfully to the narrative drive. Glück writes poems of alternating ecstasy and self-repudiation. Most recently, in her long poem “Prism,” Glück has developed her long interest in didactic subgenres like riddle and parable, interspersing them with more conventional lyricism to write a non-narrative, indeed “prismatic” autobiography.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Robert Lowell's public and aesthetic vision as it relates to the use of the forms of biography in poetry. This is followed by sections that discuss four poets from the following generations (David Antin, John Koethe, James McMichael, and Louise Glück), under the aegis of the same concept of "biographical form."

Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and James Weldon Johnson, to George Oppen, Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, A. K. Ramanujan, and Charles Wright, poets interlace poetry with prayer, drawing on its apostrophe, intimate address, awed colloquy, solemn petition, musical recursiveness, and other features. At the same time, they work the tensions between poetry and prayer, tensions between invention and devotion first identified by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century: they skeptically question prayer’s conventions, refuse to subordinate imaginative idiosyncrasy, indulge metaphor and the aesthetic for their own sake, and thus push poetry beyond prayerful norms. Modern and contemporary poetry mobilizes the performative energies of prayer, but steps back from and reframes them, playing in the space between prayer and antiprayer.

This is a book about the relationship between fact and figure in American poetry. Poetic figuration (and the imaginative activity it emblematizes) seems to be either factual or explicitly afactual, the mark of renunciation and transcendence in the face of mere fact. The particular class of “autobiographical” facts discussed in this book seem especially mundane, which is to say, especially subject to triumphant transcendence (and erasure) by the imagination. This bias against autobiography seems particularly American or, to be more precise, particularly Americanist. The primary sponsors of this bias would seem to be Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. The breadth of the Whitmanian conception of self, its essentially compound or “cellular” nature, poses a challenge for later writers who would speak more narrowly of their own experiences. In Emerson we see the earliest suggestion that the failure of the imagination and autobiography are causally connected. The poets it features, such as Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank O'Hara, become themselves by becoming Whitman, but become Whitman, equally, by becoming themselves.

With the telling and retelling of stories by the narrator and characters, Homer’s Odyssey seems to invite the reworking of episodes and characters in new forms. Modern poets favour the dramatic monologue for entering into dialogue with a revered canonical text, often in an irreverent or subversive manner. Dramatic monologues are crucial to the revisionist mythology of women writers, often representing female characters who are peripheral and largely silent in classical texts in order to articulate some element of the story that was previously untold. Poets such as Linda Pastan, Carol Ann Duffy, Louise Glück, and Judith Kazantzis use monologue and dialogue to create reworkings of the Odyssey that relocate Odysseus to the margins of the story and question the importance of his heroic adventures.

Along with its heroine Penelope, the Odyssey presents an array of ‘other women’, female figures such as the Sirens, Calypso, and Circe, who impede Odysseus’ progress and stand as rivals to Penelope, but who cannot prevent Odysseus’ return to his much-prized wife. In this chapter, we consider the legacy of these figures, and especially of Circe, in poems by modern and contemporary female writers, including Margaret Atwood, H.D., Carol Ann Duffy, Louise Glück, Linda Pastan, and Augusta Davies Webster. While these authors may differ in their stances towards feminist politics and efforts to define a feminist poetics, their choice to speak through mythical figures who have considerable powers but are ultimately sidelined and abandoned yields searching, often sharply critical accounts of ancient and modern gender arrangements.

Gathering together common themes from works by Barth, Gaiman, Byatt, Selick, Ferrante, Morrison, Bloom, Rushdie, and Patchett, a brief Conclusion reflects on the ubiquity of the descent motif and its status as a literary space in the context of postmodernism’s critiques of the canon. Underworld mythology lends itself to postmodern interrogations of authenticity, history, and authorial proprietorship. Further uses of the underworld tradition include artist Anish Kapoor’s “Descent into Limbo,” Oliver Sacks’ memoir Awakenings, Andrew Sean Greer’s novel Less, and Louise Glück’s Averno. The Other Worlds imagined in catabatic fiction contribute to these themes with implied correspondences between dreams and ghosts.