Home > Work > American Originality: Essays on Poetry
1 " Nothing in the past can be changed or restored. But the present can change the way it is thought about. In this new enactment, presence can replace absence, which is the best that can be managed in human time. "
― Louise Glück , American Originality: Essays on Poetry
2 " Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious; because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted. "
3 " Certain brilliantly intellectual writers are not treated as intellectual writers because they don’t observe the correct forms: their poetry may be deeply learned and sophisticated, informed by quite radical rethinking of philosophical issues, but if the style of the poems is too lively, too grammatically clear, if it is not, on the surface, difficult, it does not conform to established definitions of intellectual daring. "
4 " The dark side of self-creation is its underlying and abiding sense of fraud. "
5 " Contemporary literature is, to a marked degree, a literature of the self examining its responses. "
6 " One can appear (one is expected to appear) to be querying, to be turning around and examining the idea, but this little dance is a dance of appeasement, designed to silence any feeling that one’s thinking is pat. "
