One of the most striking features of Faithful and Virtuous Night is its focus on the character of a fictional English painter, whose story begins in "Faithful and Virtuous Night" and ends in "The White Series." Much of Louise Glück's earlier work had made use of inanimate, mythological, or historical personae to convey aesthetic and philosophical points, but her deployment of this speaker in this collection—one that is both so close to life and so close to Glück herself—has raised a lot of questions in the time since the book's publication.
To elaborate, the painter seems to be fixated on very similar aesthetic issues as Glück—specifically, silence, trauma, and loss—and is also a creative (although his chosen medium differs from Glück's). Moreover, much like Glück, the painter is deeply interested in and fixated on the idea of mortality. Glück herself has mentioned that this interest in mortality and death was magnified in her own life with the publication of her Poems 1962–2012, which she resisted calling her "Collected" poems for fear that it conveyed a premature sense of finality or ending: "Sometimes I would just stack my books together and think, wow, you haven’t wasted all your time. But then I was very afraid because it was a completely new sensation, that pride, and I thought, oh, this means really bad things." In order to combat the contentment or complacency that accompanies completing a lifetime's worth of work, she then started to spur herself to write Faithful and Virtuous Night. At the same time, however, Glück was moved by her friend and fellow poet Richard Siken's advice to "play in the mud for a while, just play in the mud, make things in the mud" while writing the collection and wanted to have low standards for herself so that she would not feel creatively exhausted. Even so, Glück has said that, in writing Faithful and Virtuous Night, she felt "that [she] had done everything [she] knew to think of. [She] felt [she] needed another person’s brain."
Enter the character of the English painter. In other words, while Glück had already been contending with the themes of silence, loss, and mortality for much of her career, her specific need to tangle with these themes in the context of her wider oeuvre as a writer (i.e., considering the fact that Faithful and Virtuous Night would likely be one of her last collections, if not her final collection of poetry) overwhelmed her. This was not only because she had a much deeper personal investment in death and silence at this point in her life, but also because she had never confronted these themes directly, from her own voice: "I didn’t want to write about it in the first-person, or at least not from my life." At the same time, however, she knew that her collection had to have a grounding in the personal: "it needed to be a story about someone. I didn’t want to say, 'then words did not come.' I’ve read poems like that, and I don’t like them."
While working on the collection, then, Glück wanted to keep an intermediate distance between herself and her persona to lower the stakes for herself as a writer while also allowing herself to convey aesthetic and philosophical messages that carry deep importance for her as a creative and older person. As mentioned, when Glück first started the collection, the persona "wasn’t a painter—it was a child who lived in a farmhouse with her mother who took in sewing. There were a lot of lines about sewing, but I ran out of steam after about three stanzas because I had no idea what this voice was for. But I had all those notes, and I thought, well, could I use them again?" Out of this initial venture, Glück then worked out the character of the English painter and developed it into the poetry present throughout Faithful and Virtuous Night.
Knowing this information about Glück's thoughts and writing process that guided her to the character of the painter, two things then become important for us to question. First, why does Glück choose to complement these "painter poems" with poem written from the perspective of a female writer that more closely mirrors her own voice? Is it a matter of shame or humility when broaching certain topics? Second, why does Glück choose to develop the painter in the specific way that she does? In other words, why does she choose an English person, a gay man, and someone of high socioeconomic status to represent her aesthetic preoccupations and thoughts of death on the page? Is it meant to bring attention to what, despite everything, remains the same between her and her persona, or is there a different purpose at work?
