Marguerite's poems are "astonishingly self-aware and self-reflexive. They comment continually upon their own strategies, confronting over and over again the problem of finding a language to express the ineffable".

Robert Cottrell, French Professor at Ohio State U., in his book, The Grammar of Silence, describes Marguerite's poetry. Mainly "devotinal works", the "poems describe the anguish and joy of the Christian wayfarer who seeks to negotiate the ladder of perfection (scala perfectionis ) and to attain the final stage of mystical ecstasy (unio mystica). They express a l onging for union with God, a desire to efface difference, a yearning for a spiritual state in which everything in the world is perceived as a signifier whose referent is always Christ, the one and only signified. Composed in the Augustus- Dionysian tradition that equates the Johannine logos , or the Word, with silence. (It transcends human discourse.) Marguerite's poems confront with relentless persistence the problem of finding a language capable of signifying 'Divine Silence', the generator of all discourse."

Cottrell calls his book "a grammar" because "it studies the parts of speech and the syntax of [Marguerite's] 'language'. It tries to clasify the ways in which Marguerite's texts encode and produce meaning. At the same time, it is a reading or decoding of Marguerite's poems that ends up re-encoding in the folds of a second text [Cottrell's text] whatever significance is disclosed in the course of that reading .... Each discrete text is a metaphor (translatio) for Christ the Text, the Verbum that was in the beginning.... In a sense, Marguerite's poetry is an extension of the spiritual and linguistic concerns that are ennunciated in her correspondence with [Guillaume] Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, who for four years (1521-14) served as her mentor and counselor. Traces of Briçonnet's vocabularly and thought are present in all of Marguerite's poetry.... This book then is a series of readings.... Because Marguerite's poems are all signs pointing to God and the reign of charity, they are, in sense, 'repetitious' ... [what] Kiergegaard mean when he declared that man's speech is always a 'repetition' of God's speech, a sign of the inexhaustible fertiliity of the Word reproducing Itself and renewing its unique meaning in an endloess flow of language.... Taking my cue from Marguerite, I, too, address my book to 'lecteurs de bonne conscience'."

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