The Seven Ages by Louise Glück
Published 2001 · 18,700 words · about 2 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Seven Ages to read?
The Seven Ages scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Plain words placed with great precision.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Short lines, but the sentences run across them unpredictably.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- Time, memory and mortality handled abstractly.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Compressed; the poems are spare and heavy at once.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- A speaker who circles her subject without naming it.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Gardens, meals and childhood scenes carry the argument.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Frequent turns against her own statements.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Poems end on suspension rather than conclusion.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- A sequence with recurring figures rather than a narrative.
How The Seven Ages is regarded
The Seven Ages holds a literary regard score of 67 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.