Proofs and Theories
Louise Gluck's award-winning collection of essays is the work of a major poet and a distinguished teacher. She writes of her upbringing, her human and literary antecedents, and she dwells with a scrupulous eye on details of lives and poems, until she comes to understand them.
The act of integrity involved in the essays is part and parcel of this poet's unsparing candour. Her criticism takes risks and can be fierce passionate, merciless to its subjects, even (or especially) when the subject is herself. The consolations that such essays offer are those of clarity. She attends to T. S. Eliot, George Oppen, Sylvia Plath, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, John Berryman and others, appraising what is risked in the work of each writer, and what we risk and gain in reading them.
The act of integrity involved in the essays is part and parcel of this poet's unsparing candour. Her criticism takes risks and can be fierce passionate, merciless to its subjects, even (or especially) when the subject is herself. The consolations that such essays offer are those of clarity. She attends to T. S. Eliot, George Oppen, Sylvia Plath, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, John Berryman and others, appraising what is risked in the work of each writer, and what we risk and gain in reading them.
About the author
Louise Gluck, born in 1943, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection "The Wild Iris". She has published eleven books of poetry and a book of essays on poetry, "Proofs and Theories" (1994). She teaches at Yale University as Writer in Residence and in the Creative Writing Program of Boston University. She was appointed the US Poet Laureate from 2003-2004.