THE CYCLE OF SEASONS: AN ANALYSIS OF LOUISE GLÜCK'S SELECTED POEMS (original) (raw)

Seeking Solace in Nature: A Study of Louise Glück's A Village Life

Humanities and Social Science Studies, 2023

Landscape is not just the outer terrain or the environment surrounding us. It plays a cardinal role in our life and culture. Ecocriticism tries to bring out the relationship between nature and human life, through literature. Nobel Laureate Louise Glück is one of the most prolific contemporary poets from America who has written more than 10 collections of poetry. Louise Glück's works have been interpreted by various critics from different perspectives based on different theories among which consciousness of death, trauma and psychoanalysis are usually focused upon. This article intends to bring out the poet's ecological consciousness by pointing out the expression of the relationship between man and nature through Glück's poetic voice and the indispensable role that nature plays in human life as portrayed by the poet. Human life and nature are inextricably intertwined with each other. This paper tries to analyse Louise Glück's poetry collection A Village Life from an ecocritical point of view and to examine how poet has created an analogy between city and village life, expounding how nature acts as a source of relief to people in distress and despair.

In Nature is Joy: An Ecopsychological Study of Alice Walker’s Selected Poems

Journal of Garmian University, 2019

The Earth is facing serious environmental problems nowadays. The problems started from a time when human beings decided to build industrial cities, factories, and advanced technologies. The problems like global warming, pollution, and climate change have affected the life of every being on the planet. They reached an alarming time that influenced writers and environmentalists to raise their voices against all human actions that destruct the environment and the Earth. The serious attempts of the writers resulted in the rise of literary environmental theory-Ecocriticism‖ in the last decades of the twentieth century. The theory appeared as a need for changing the contemporary human beings' paradigm

A Contradiction in Nature: The Attitude Toward Nature and Its Implications in James Thomson's "The Seasons"

Literary Imagination, Oxford University Press, 2014

The attitude toward nature in James Thomson’s "The Seasons" has not been duly noted by literary commentators. Instead, the reception of "The Seasons" in modern literary criticism has focused on all sorts of aspects, ranging from visual imagery, to “dislocation, deformity and renewal.” However, when nature as a theme in the poem has been tackled, critics have favored its religious implications—specifically, those pertaining to the historical period in English literature, as well as a number of hypotheses about Thomson’s own relation toward god—over Thomson’s conception of nature on its own terms. Furthermore, none has, in my view, concentrated enough on the most emblematic characteristic of "The Seasons": its unresolved stance toward the natural and its strongly polarized attitude toward it. The aim of this essay is to examine these inconsistencies in order to reveal what they tell us about the period’s changing perspectives, to place "The Seasons"’ reception of the natural in the history of eighteenth-century literature, and to uncover the implications and fertile consequences of Thomson’s view of nature—which spill into para-literary domains.

The Concentration and Sublimation of Time as Memory in Louise Glück's Poetry

Papers in Arts and Humanities

The preoccupation with the mythical time of the world, of humanity, and of each individual's life comes as one of the most powerful poetic tools in Louise Glück's poems. From evoking the foundational times of the Garden of Eden, or the "immutable" hard nut represented by Greek mythology, the poet concentrates whatever may suggest an evolution in time in those initial 'moments'. Her reading of the history of human soul seems to suggest that everything stopped with the first page, or the first words. This study will come with many suggestions of poems that support this vision on Glück's use of memory or anamnesis (ἀνάμνησις) as the only path to understanding humanity.

A Poet for All Seasons

Werkwinkel, 2014

This is a translation of a general introduction to an anthology of poetry by Olga Kirsch. Major themes and motifs of her work are outlined, as well as a short biography of the authoress is presented. The selection from the poems of Olga Kirsch was published to celebrate her 70th birthday on 23rd of September 1994 as Nou spreek ek weer bekendes aan: ’n Keur 1944-1983 [Now I’m Again Addressing Familiar Ones: A Selection 1944-1983]. For the purposes of the translation the ending of the original introduction has been altered.

An ecocritical reading of flowers in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

International Journal of Human Sciences, 2015

Flowers are one of the most popular motifs in verse as well as in prose. Many critics have noted that nature is at the core of Alice Walker's epistolary novel The Color Purple (1983) in which depicting or writing about flowers requires special attention. However, in Alice Walker's The Color Purple, flowers are depicted and written about to convey strong negative emotions as well as positive ones. In this study, how flowers are depicted or written about in the novel is studied through an ecocritical lens. I argue that Walker's use of flowers provides examples of the vitality of a hopeful existence especially when various flowers mentioned in the novel are considered along with the seasonal changes organically affecting such floral richness. I equally argue that Walker uses flowers to show the change experienced by the major character, Celie. In that sense, Walker's flowers are in direct coexistence with the major character, Celie.