" Glück does not write confessionally about madness, suicide, and incest, as though these extreme experiences were a poet’s only access to reality. But she also does not reject the ideal of extremity; she merely denies that it has to be lived in order to be written about. She insists that it is not the content of experience which allows it to rise to the grandeur of myth, but the intensity the artist brings to it. If Glück is “against sincerity,” she is completely enthralled by authenticity, in just the sense that Lionel Trilling intended: an “extreme . . . exercise of personal will.” Her work is a tour de force of this kind of will. "

― Adam Kirsch , The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry