Draft or Matrix: The Poetics of Endurance and Embracement in Louise Glück’s Firstborn

This study focuses on the ‘narrative of endurance’ that drives Louise Glück’s poetry. It pays particular attention to the potential of her first collection, Firstborn, which served as a matrix nurturing future possibilities. Drawing poetic energy from the sense of isolation stemming from family death, her own illness, loss and despair, Glück delves into the inner sufferings from Firstborn, as if exploring it. Glück poeticizes and embraces a life of endurance without illusion. While Glück’s poetry, awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, is discussed from various perspectives, Firstborn is often devalued as her early draft that hasn’t yet gone beyond her subjective monologue. Yet Firstborn shows there is a moment when an individual’s humble ‘narrative of endurance’ makes a radical leap. This paper argues that the origin of Glück’s poetic styles is based upon the aesthetics of this extreme leaping moment. Glück’s subsequent collections develop, through varied techniques other than monologue, the idea that an individual’s sense of isolation can undergo a qualitative leap and compensation through poetic representation. Therefore, this study aims to reevaluate the poetic value of Glück’s Firstborn and explain the potential as the foundation for later poetry, referring to her essays and psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s “Depression-position.” .