Dante and Louise Glück

Louise Glück's 1999 book, called "Vita Nuova" is a direct reference to Dante's

13th century book of the same name. But, whereas Dante bases his book

on the encounter and loss of secular love, Glück refers to her daily experiences

of life with her loved one and how they bring her happiness. Although she, too,

loses her loved one due to misunderstandings and divorce, she still remains

with the memory of love and its expression through poetry. Finally, both

poets come out of their love experience as more mature people having

lived through the unison of souls through bodily and sensual experience.

In Dante, love is more platonic than in Glück who, despite her bodily fragility

and despair, surmounts the conflict that loss causes by sublimation

rather than the expiation of sin and guilt. Glück says that sin is a common

existential attribute of most people. For Dante sin is G-D's punishment

for vice and must be expiated to attain a state of divine grace.

Both poets express their acquired wisdom in verse; in Glück's poetry

wisdom takes the form of quai-aphorisms born from her insight

and directly related to her experience and the internalization

of her personal affective life. "You saved me. You should remember me."

She addresses her lover thus. Her insights and interrogations are related

to her deep quest of memory. In one of her insights, she says

that if one is afraid of love, one is afraid of death because for her love

means the giving up of oneself to another. In another aphorism, she states

her lover recovered her, implying that love is recovery from internal

wounds that have been repressed. Another stylistic strategy takes

the form of direct self-questioning: "Do you regret your life?"

"Do you remember your childhood?" We are, one would think,

in a psychoanalytical session and/or in a post-session in which

self-questioning continues the work of memory and remembrance.