<p>In her poetry collection, <em>The Wild Iris</em><em>,</em> Louise Glück constructs her own version of the divine garden of Eden with its own modern issues. The essay explores how passivity is portrayed and defended in the collection, both through her female speaker and in the way the garden has been constructed. The speaker latches on to different forms of passivity, such as devotion, perseverance and prayer, and refuses to adapt to her surroundings and contribute to the garden. The speaker distances herself from her physical surroundings, building walls as opposed to accommodating to her environment as she is encouraged to from her god and family; in this way she avoids visible progress and development. This isolation and refusal to adapt is a choice and an exhibition of the speaker's power; there is self-awareness present in the reader's refusal to adapt as she attempts to maintain the status quo. As a result, the speaker’s passivity allows her to elevate herself above the other humans in the collection; embracing passivity allows her to transcend progress. Other ways in which progress is avoided are also explored; Glück presents many voices in the collection that all seek contact and fail to achieve it. The reader is also involved, becoming yet another character that fails to interfere and communicate.</p>

In her poetry collection, The Wild Iris, Louise Glück constructs her own version of the divine garden of Eden with its own modern issues. The essay explores how passivity is portrayed and defended in the collection, both through her female speaker and in the way the garden has been constructed. The speaker latches on to different forms of passivity, such as devotion, perseverance and prayer, and refuses to adapt to her surroundings and contribute to the garden. The speaker distances herself from her physical surroundings, building walls as opposed to accommodating to her environment as she is encouraged to from her god and family; in this way she avoids visible progress and development. This isolation and refusal to adapt is a choice and an exhibition of the speaker's power; there is self-awareness present in the reader's refusal to adapt as she attempts to maintain the status quo. As a result, the speaker’s passivity allows her to elevate herself above the other humans in the collection; embracing passivity allows her to transcend progress. Other ways in which progress is avoided are also explored; Glück presents many voices in the collection that all seek contact and fail to achieve it. The reader is also involved, becoming yet another character that fails to interfere and communicate.

Joining the rich literary history of prayerful and supplicative poetry, Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris pays homage to this tradition, while at the same time subverting it. In the critical introduction, I discuss how Glück incorporates the adhesive power of paradox as a means of connecting the entire collection, with its competing and often contradictory voices, together in a meaningful way. I argue that the end result is a beautifully complex collection of spiritually secular prayers. The second part of my thesis contains thirty-eight pages of my own poetry, which also explore issues of the divine, as well as lying, family, and loss.

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The preface to this collection, "Speculation and Silence," argues that confessional poetry remains integral to contemporary poetics, though the implications of the term have changed since its "first-generation." Confessional poetry must not be dependent on simply the transmission of sensational details and the emotional consequences, but on poets' implementation of silence and restraint in both the diffusion of ideas and in the crafting of the piece. Vulgar Moon is a collection of poems in which I explore the implications of events ranging from erotic love and motherhood, to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and Jewish history. In addition, these pieces explore the inner workings of the human psyche, both tender and malignant, and the inherent human need for absolution.

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Ces quarante dernières années, Louise Glück a su s’imposer dans le paysage de la poésiecontemporaine américaine sans que l’on ait jamais pu l’assigner à quelque genre que ce soit. Sa poésie déroute car traversée par le féminin, elle s’obstine pourtant à lui résister. Le moi glückien se dissimule derrière des masques plus ou moins opaques : des personae de la mythologie telle Perséphone auxmasques sournoisement transparents du recueil Ararat, sa voix poétique se fait plurielle mais singulière, celle d’un moi qui parle, toujours en proie au désir. Glück édifie dans chacun de ses recueils un réseau de paradigmes où la mémoire coexiste avec l’oubli, où la domesticité s’oppose à l’ailleurs hostile, où le mythe et l’ordinaire se confrontent et se confondent.Louise Glück esquive ces structures paradigmatiques à travers une poétique épurée et une ponctuation qui obscurcissent et diffèrent le sens jusqu’à l’éluder. L’entre-deux que son oeuvre explore forme à la fois un interstice et une béance : ce peut être la fissure d’Averno, la crevasse du deux-points ou le silence de Dieu dans The Wild Iris ; le milieu qui nous sépare de l’autre et de nous-mêmes et qui, simultanément, nous lie inextricablement à eux. Nous appelons ce milieu pluriel le neutre, concept que nous devons à Roland Barthes qui lui a consacré un cours au Collège de France en 1977-1978. Nous nous sommes inspirés de son approche pour lire la poésie de Glück, dont les personae sont habitées par un désir qui est, chez le poète, un désir d’écriture pour surseoir à la mort : un désir de neutre. / For forty years now, Louise Glück has been a major figure in contemporary American poetry, particularly because her poems shun the obvious and the lyric genres as we know them. If her poetry give the feminine to read, her work resists and endures it as a genre. The various masks the poet puts on may often seem transparent, but the poetic voice remains that of a persona, be it Persephone or even the ones in Ararat, her most life-inspired collection. Many and different are the faces to people her work, but behind the mask, Glück’s remains unique: her voice can be described as Dickinsonian in its bareness and subversive imagery: disguised as a desiring I, the impersonal threatens. Throughout her work, Glück has drawn a web of paradigmatic oppositions, only to be ‘baffled’: memory coexists with oblivion, the safe and cozy home is opposed to the dangerous outside world, the mythic and the mundane are intertwined in Meadowlands.Louise Glück evades and outplays the paradigm thanks to a bare language and a choice of punctuation, which darken and delay meaning to the extent of eluding it. Her poems explore an inbetweenness, which assumes the shape of a Freudian rift in Persephone’s soul, or of God’s silence to His creatures’s prayers in The Wild Iris. We are naming such in-betweenness the Neutral, a theory the French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes exposed in a lecture course at the Collège de France in 1977-1978. The Neutral is the desire and its intensity, it is what parts us from the other and from ourselves, what intimately binds us together. Our reading of Louise Glück’s poetry was firstly inspired by Barthes’s theory. We see in her work a desire for the Neutral which translates as a desire for the poet to write, and relentlessly defer the instant of death.

There are a variety of studies that show that absolute income is positively correlated with individual well-being, but find at the same time that average income of the reference group (comparison income) affects individual well-being most often negatively (Clark et al., 2008). Although the results allover the literature are quite consistent, there is a large variety how the reference group is defined. For example, some authors assume that people compare themselves with people living in the same area (Luttmer, 2005; Graham & Felton, 2006) or with people inside the same age range (McBride, 2001). Others define the reference group more precisely and assume that people compare themselves with people of same age, same education and same area of living (Ferrer-i-Carbonell, 2005). However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no systematic empirical research on the impact of different reference group specifications on life satisfaction in happiness regressions. Therefore, I investigate in this master thesis to what extent different reference group specifications alter the statistical impact of comparison income on happiness regarding sign, magnitude and statistical significance. The results show that the specification of the reference group matters, since some specifications produce significant and others produce insignificant coefficients. However, the results also show that the sub-sample treated has a considerable impact on sign and statistical significance of the reference groups defined.

The thesis explores the variety of dialogue in the work of American poetess Louise Glück (*1943). It also points out three options for crossing over the aesthetics of absence. The analysis concerns mainly poems included in the collection The Wild Iris (1992), but it also takes in consideration Gluck's other poetical books such as Averno (2006) and Meadowlands (1996). After naming the nodes which make the contact in the collections, the thesis surpasses the field of literature for creating the dialogue with the aesthetics of absence according to German composer Heiner Goebbels (*1952), with the negative theology of French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) and with the absence of the other in the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916). This interdisciplinary dialog seeks to describes one of the major tendencies of Gluck's poetry, which is the ghostly possibility of encountering with otherness

I believe that poetry has survived for thousands of years because it provides people with a transpersonal connection that they can't find elsewhere. I look for poetry that is more than an emotional expression, more than witty word play, and more than an interesting observation. I want poetry to give me that inspirational spark, that glimpse into a world beyond my own. Poems that succeed in doing this force me into a perspective that I haven't previously imagined by yoking together two or more seemingly disparate elements. This tension between the old elements and the new link between them creates energy for the poem. This poetic nexus contributes to the transpersonal experience that I seek.