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Louise Glück's Meadowlands is woven together from interrelated sets of poems within the work as a whole. Such sets or series of poems include the following:
For this essay, choose any one series and discuss its meaning in terms of the book as a whole. What is this subset of poems telling us? What is its story? What does it reveal about its characters? What role does the set play in the larger work? How does it look inward, so to speak, to draw on Homer's epic? How does it look outward to the contemporary world of this dysfunctional family? These are some of the questions you might discuss in your analysis. Though I have sorted out these five subsets, you are not limited to them. If there is a coherent set of poems you'd rather analyze, feel free. I suggest, though I do not require, that you run your idea past me first. Note on the Penelope/Bard theme. Meadowlands is an unusual literary hybrid: It is a set of lyric poems and dramatic monologues that constitute a sort of novella in verse; it makes heavy, recurrent use of a classical epic; and it is, to some degree, transparently autobiographical. Glück is both the "bard" of the epic, creating and arranging its pieces, and, as Penelope, a character within it. Penelope herself, we learn, is a poet, and she and "Odysseus" often find themselves discussing her poetry, even her self-revelations within her poetry. (How's that for a hall of mirrors?) These references do not so much constitute a distinct subset of the poems as a theme showing up through several of them. Still, a careful examination of the relationships among the author, her self-portrait, and her role as bard would make for an interesting essay. |