“The Implied Reader and Depressive Experience in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris“ is still too close to me, where I am now, for me to offer much reflection. I admire Glück’s gift so much, and perhaps the way she put it at the center of her life — but in a way she is the inverted image of Ginsberg for me. His “Howl” was a cry of suffering that led him to a deeper joy; her poems of ordinary life and momentary intensities seem to have constructed slowly around her a cage, the terrible cage of selfhood.

Here’s the abstract: This essay examines the role of mental illness in contemporary poetics, arguing that it is often overlooked through denial or repressed through misunderstanding. Specifically, it argues that what Wolfgang Iser called the implied reader is, in the case of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, constructed as depressed. The essay offers close readings of her poems, which demonstrate the way a depressed implied reader leads the speaker to a moment of transformation. The second half of the essay looks at how most contemporary theories of reader-response inadequately describe the disability Glück’s work references. It offers a critique of the phobia of mental illness in contemporary apologies for literary reading and argues that even work that acknowledges readers as potentially mentally disabled might benefit from the concept of implied reader in overcoming ableism.