Abstract

The primary speaker of Louise Glück's The Wild Iris is a wanderer in her own garden. She relentlessly searches for God among her foxgloves and daisies, straining to hear God's voice. Two other speakers, God and the collective plants of the garden, offer their perspectives without acknowledgement by the human speaker. Many critics read these two other speakers as, in fact, narcissistic projections of the human speaker, a God and a world made in her own image. In this thesis, I clarify that the kind of narcissistic projection that occurs in The Wild Iris is actually productive for genuine spiritual experience and encounters with the divine, not self-deluded illusions. If these two other speakers are in fact animated by the human speaker, it is through poetry's ability to facilitate encounters with alterity. With Michel de Certeau's concept of metaphorai in mind, I argue that the speaker's eventual communion with God is particularly made possible by her use of metaphor, which allows her to linguistically traverse the distance between her and God.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; English

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