Louise Gluck's Twenty-First-Century Lyric

This essay examines a contemporary poetics that implicitly challenges prevailing critiques of lyric as asocial, monologic, and naively self-expressive. Louise Gluck practices a lyric mode whose plainspoken surface and emotional immediacy belie its metalinguistic and metafictional complexity. Her poems' illocutionary structures and their attunement to everyday grammatical nuance convey an understanding of language as situational, context-dependent shared action, an understanding that chimes with the insights of ordinary-language philosophy. The perspectives offered by Gluck's work can fruitfully complicate dominant models of lyric and binary narratives of American poetic history that set lyric voice against philosophical ambition and linguistic innovation.