On Dec. 7, newly-minted laureate Louise Glück delivered her Nobel acceptance speech outside of her Massachusetts home. In it, the poet expressed her lifelong interest in a kind of confessional poem, in which the speaker intimately addresses the reader. And in making her point, she lauded a work many found tone-deaf in the current climate, prompting some to compare the speech to blackface.
Glück built her speech around a childhood competition she held for the greatest poem in the world.
“There were two finalists,” Glück said, “[William] Blake’s ‘The Little Black Boy’ and Stephen Foster’s ‘Swanee River.’”