Blevins is an essayist and poet who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in the Virginia Community College System. In this essay, Blevins contends that there is an unfortunate gap between Glück's rhetorical and poetic arguments in her poem.

There is sometimes a noticeable gap between what a poet states to be the truth and what her language indicates to be the truth. This gap has to do with the ability of language to communicate feeling through rhythm and music and can be either an intentional strategy or the result of an actual disconnection between thought and feeling. In some poems, this gap creates ambiguity or irony or both: if a poem tries to express an idea or feeling that its language does not support or impose, the reader might experience the pleasure of irony, which is the pleasure of the jolt...