SOURCE: "Purity and Impurity in Poetry," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 182-89.

Stitt is an American educator and critic. This excerpt from a review of Descending Figure classifies Glück's work as "pure poetry," which Stitt defines as verse that is more concerned with superficial qualities of structure and technique than with the intellectual or emotional core of poetic experience.

Among many other things, there is pure poetry, there is impure poetry, and there is everything in between. The pure poem is exclusive, attends tea parties, breathes rarified air; the impure poem is democratic, tends to drink too much, revels in ribald stories. The impure poem is anxious to get everything in; the pure poem is concerned to leave most things out. The poetic age, the one in which we live, seems especially concerned to get everything in—every possible kind of poet and...