Like Dolls with Their Heads Cut Off 
Laura Quinney
Louise Glück, the poet laureate of the United States for 2003-2004, belongs to the line of American poets who value fierce lyric compression. This tradition was established by Emily Dickinson and her followers: H.D., Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Bishop. It is a tradition predominantly, though not exclusively, of women poets; the opposing tradition of ornate or discursive amplitude has been predominantly male (Whitman, Crane, Pound, Eliot, Ginsberg). Wariness and rigour characterise this genus of poetry by American women. Dark, incisive and severe, it treats every species of indulgence with mistrust, from rhetorical excess to wilful illusion.
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Laura Quinney is the author of Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth and The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery. She teaches at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Other articles by this contributor:
Poisonous Frogs · Allusion v. Influence
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