Ellen Bryant Voigt: Double Double (July 2009)

Ellen Bryant Voigt, expanding on her January 2009 class, examines what she calls “empirical irony,” “paradoxical doubling” based on factual evidence.  Through close readings of poems by Robert Frost and Louise Glück, she considers how irony can enable writers to say two things at the same time, “apparently contradictory, both true.”  Voigt makes crucial the distinction between ironic style, which seeks to conceal deep feeling, and irony, which discloses it, and whose subtext is “less bitterness than heartbreak.”