From Wasteland to Meadowlands: Louise Glück’s Postmodern Reinvention of T. S. Eliot’s Mythical Poetics in Meadowlands

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_138How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Louise Glück; T. S. Eliot; Mythical Method; Postmodernism; Meadowlands

Abstract

With T. S. Eliot’s modernist poetics as a point of reference, this paper explores how Louise Glück “makes individual existence universal” (Nobel Prize Citation) in her poetry collection Meadowlands. Glück creatively transforms Eliot’s “Mythical Method” from a tool for restoring cultural order into a strategy for distilling the personal experiences of modern life. Through close reading and comparative analysis, the paper examines how Glück inherits Eliotic concepts such as “impersonality” and the “objective correlative” and uses a mythical parallel structure as a “distancing device” to go beyond the limitations of traditional confessional poetry. Subsequently, the paper demonstrates Glück’s transcendence of Eliot, reflected in three dimensions: the transformation in scale from spiritual crisis to private domestic and bodily trauma, the shift in purpose from imposing order to revealing the “fated chaos” of relationships, and the transformation in voice from a unified perspective to a polyphonic narrative style characterized by “verdicts”. By innovatively applying Eliot’s theories, Glück forges a different path to universality that is rooted in rendering the individual predicament paradigmatic. Therefore, this study not only reveals the profound dialogue between Glück and the modernist legacy but also provides a poetic answer as to how her poetry can achieve universal resonance in a fragmented postmodern context.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Qixi Yao
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/26
TI  - From Wasteland to Meadowlands: Louise Glück’s Postmodern Reinvention of T. S. Eliot’s Mythical Poetics in Meadowlands
BT  - Proceeding of 2025 8th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1267
EP  - 1280
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_138
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_138
ID  - Yao2026
ER  -