SOURCE: Dodd, Elizabeth. “Louise Glück: The Ardent Understatement of Postconfessional Classicism.” In The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H. D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück, pp. 149–96. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992.

We have seen three different manifestations of the personal classicist mode undertaken by three very different women. H. D. worked to develop the persona poem as a means to present a palimpsest of personal and mythic experience, and to embed autobiography within a timeless continuum of countless women's experiences. Even while declaring certain subjects taboo for women artists, Louise Bogan tried to perfect the lyric as a modernist form for women, a possibility for understated personal expression in a time when the high moderns often moved toward longer, disjunctive narratives and a greater reliance on irony. Elizabeth Bishop continued to enhance the possibilities for a tone emphasizing the emotional importance of personal details that are themselves muted or even omitted.

The mature work of the contemporary poet Louise Glück represents a kind of postconfessional personal classicism—one in which the voice of the self is muted by an amplified sense of the mythic, the archetypal (somewhat like H. D.), without losing the compelling presence of an individual, contemporary “I,” a personal voice addressing the reader. She continues the search for personal expression in a poetry that nonetheless relies on silence and omission and eschews extreme statement or merely private disclosure. In this respect she is more like Bogan than any of the others treated so far, yet she extends beyond Bogan's achievement in bringing women's poetry into a new kind of feminist awareness; one editor, Carol Rumens, has termed Glück a “post-feminist” writer. She explains, “‘Post-feminist’ expresses a psychological, rather than political, condition, though its roots are no doubt political. It implies a mental freedom which a few outstanding women in any age have achieved, and which many more, with increasing confidence, are claiming today.” Classification according to Elaine Showalter's historical examination would tend to support such a view. Showalter sees a “female” phase of literature following a “feminist” one; in the “female” literature that has emerged throughout the twentieth century, writers “turn … to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature.”¹

While such statements seem to imply that feminist intent is no longer applicable to many contemporary writers, and that the sexist forces that have shaped and even distorted women's work in the past have ceased to function, Glück must be understood as a transitional poet. She moves, with many of her contemporaries, further along the path toward psychic freedom and—yes—equality. But as Rumens cautions, “The term [post-feminist] is certainly not meant to suggest that utopia has arrived, and that all is now milk and honey for the once-oppressed.”² Instead, transitional writers such as Glück continue to turn with the “increasing confidence” Rumens mentions to an inner reliance in their pursuit of formal exploration. Glück has developed the poem sequence as a means for extended expression built upon reticence, and she has introduced a startling (and apt) metaphor for women artists of the late twentieth century, likening her poetic attitude—what I call personal classicism—to anorexia nervosa. Because her work is less widely known than that of her predecessors, and because few autobiographical details are available for public scrutiny, my examination of her contribution will rely more upon close readings of the poetry itself than upon biographical background.

I add the modification “postconfessional” to distinguish Glück's particular contribution to the mode of personal classicism because, unlike the other authors in this study, she first began to write during the heyday of confessional poetry, and her earliest influences most clearly included the well-known confessional poets of the time. Her movement into personal classicism was therefore a deliberate choice to abandon the dominant mode, unlike the eschewal of explicit detail practiced continually by her predecessors. In this, Glück's shift was similar to Louise Bogan's; Bogan also began her career writing her most nearly confessional—certainly her most personal—poems and then chose to become more modernist and more reticent. To fully comprehend the ardent understatement of Glück's mature work, we must first understand in greater depth her debt to the elements that have contributed to the movement literary historians continue to identify as confessional poetry.

Admittedly, the term “confessional” is itself controversial, and many critics, including M. L. Rosenthal—who first introduced the term in his 1959 review of Robert Lowell's Life Studies—express their uneasiness about the precision and usefulness of such a label. This study is not the place to launch another extensive definition of “confessional poetry.” Yet the importance of agitated, relentless imagery and language—including the rhythms of syntax itself—among the work of the confessional poets is certainly vital to the texture of Glück's early work, and it is her deliberate discontinuation of those angry rhythms that ushers in her postconfessional stage.

Of course, the age of confessional poetry has not drawn fully to a close. The presence of a long-running debate over terminology, form, intent—damaging or not—and the presence of the poetry itself continue to help shape the work of contemporary writers. One need only open practically any literary magazine to find these confessions. In general, though, much contemporary confessional poetry doesn't make the kind of connection between the personal and the social, exploring the personally lurid or hidden in order to bring the hypocrisy of the social order under indictment, as many critics have claimed the first confessionals wanted. Many poems today divulge pathetic, graphic details in slack, post-deep-image diction, as if confession alone—“facts” alone—made poetry.

And although arguably the first confessional poets were males—W. D. Snodgrass and Lowell—the specter of a confessional school is largely a feminine haunt due to the immense popularity of Anne Sexton and, most especially, Sylvia Plath. Throughout the 1970s, critical as well as popular interest swelled around Plath as a feminist/confessional martyr; her suicide in 1963 sensationalized the discussion of her writing, even to the point of psychoanalysis of Plath's “problem,” in studies like David Holbrook's Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. Graduate students focused dissertations on her poems while the general public bought her novel, The Bell Jar. The novel was the subject of a television movie and a lawsuit. Such popularity saw to it that for some years the anthologies showcased confessional poets as women, and correspondingly, they showed confessional women poets to be among the most noticeable of contemporary women poets.

Alan Williamson has pointed out that “the very success of ‘confessional’ modes posed a threat to younger poets.”³ I would further suggest that the threat was greater for women since they had relatively fewer visible alternatives to function as models. “Threat,” as Williamson uses it, entails not personal danger from the risks of “murderous art,” as Charles Newman and A. Alvarez suggest, but rather a greater probability that the poet will work within almost preordained limits to the poetic modes and styles available to her. With so few female precursors as role models, it remains all the more difficult for a writer to learn from her influences and then move beyond them; she may very likely remain imitative rather than original. Thus we find the first book of Louise Glück, a very talented young writer, mired in imitation of the confessional mode; although technically accomplished, it remains work in apprenticeship to the popular style. Indeed, upon the publication of Firstborn (1968), most critics immediately commented on Glück's affinities with the confessional poets; reviewers saw traces in her work of Lowell, Snodgrass, Plath, and Sexton. These influences are apparent everywhere in her first collection of poems.

Something in her sensibility throughout the collection recalls Snodgrass's pronouncement from “To a Child”: “Without love we die; / With love we kill each other.” The speakers in Firstborn seem all to be dying for love and yet simultaneously to be trapped in stifling relationships that are killing something in the spirit. The speaker in “The Lady in the Single,” for example, is caught in a death-in-life existence, unable to overcome the sense of absence following the loss of her sailor-lover. Although she tries to think she has left behind the “memory,”

                                        … his ghost
Took shape in smoke above the pan roast.
Five years. In tenebris the catapulted heart drones
Like Andromeda. No one telephones.

(Firstborn, 25)

Repeatedly, the speakers make clear that romantic and familial relationships are destructive; unlike Snodgrass or Plath, however, Glück includes no character for whose sake she attempts to find redemption. There is no daughter, no needle-in-the-heart who must believe that love is “possible,” (Snodgrass), nor any son who is “the one / solid the spaces lean on, envious” (Plath).⁴ Indeed, much of the book centers on an abortion, while several poems in which children do appear show the speaker not to be the parent, but rather a slightly removed relative (“My Cousin in April”) or merely a kind stranger entering the child's life only briefly (“Returning a Lost Child”). The poems are more consistently stoical, more bleakly existential, than those of either Snodgrass or Plath, despite similarities of subject and theme. This stoicism is the seed of Glück's postconfessional classicist mode.

Like Plath and Sexton, she writes with angry bitterness about female sexual or romantic experience in a world where women remain primarily powerless. Poems like “The Egg,” “Hesitate to Call,” and “The Wound,” center around the event of an abortion in which the woman is not an active figure, exercising her right to choose and to take control of her life, but rather is one who is acted upon by others, such as a lover or a doctor. As in Plath's work, Glück's poems rely on an inventive, even pyrotechnical implementation of metaphor, frequently evoking landscapes that are in fact mindscapes. Also like Plath, Glück sometimes allows this inward-gazing use of metaphor—this melding of tenor and vehicle—to get out of control and become an impediment to the poetry, something merely clever or exclusively private. For example, lines from “The Egg,” in Firstborn, one of these poems about unwanted pregnancy and abortion, seem forced elements only of the suffering but ingenious will: “A week's meat / Spoiled, peas / Giggled in their pods.”

The formal technique employed throughout Firstborn is akin to that of Lowell. In the words of Williamson, Glück uses Lowell's “tense iambics and emphatic rhymes; his apostrophes and choked sentence fragments.” Glück herself refers to the book's “bullet-like phrases, the non-sentences.”⁵ This kind of intense, relentless syntax is typical of confessional poetry. But it is not merely the sentence structure that is bulletlike; there are the syncopated line breaks, where enjambment is disjunction; the uneasy use of rhyme; even the breaking of words in the middle, to suggest the mockery or choppy dissolution of harmony. In the false pastoral scene of “Early December in Croton on-Hudson,” the landscape prepares for what must be a terrible, inescapable sexual attraction voiced in the last line:

Spiked sun. The Hudson's
Whittled down by ice.
I hear the bone dice
Of blown gravel clicking. Bone-
pale, the recent snow
Fastens like fur to the river.
Standstill. We were leaving to deliver
Christmas presents when the tire blew
Last year. Above the dead valves pines pared
Down by a storm stood, limbs bared …
I want you.

(Firstborn, 13)

The attention to craft that many reviewers noted is evident throughout the book's many variations on fixed forms: there are, for example, half a dozen near-sonnets, poems using four-line ballad stanzas, even rhyming couplets. Glück uses these forms the way she does enjambment and rhyme in general: to emphasize disjunction and dis-ease. Just as she often selects slant rhyme to produce a more unsettling feeling in her poems than that which true rhyme generally suggests, Glück alters the elegant stability of the sonnet to suit her vision of life either threatened or already out of balance.

The most formally traditional of these near-sonnets is “My Neighbor in the Mirror.” It is shrewdly appropriate to use this form to present the subject, an affected academic, whom she calls “M. le professeur in prominent senility.” Most of the lines have five stresses and the rhyme scheme is roughly Shakespearean—the piece is certainly recognizable as a sonnet. Yet a Shakespearean sonnet's form traditionally poses a problem and then reaches, perhaps after some slight musing, a resolution. Even Bishop, in her variations of the form, maintains that basic pattern of meaning. But such implications have nothing to do with Glück's task in this poem. Instead, the “problem,” an encounter on the apartment building stairway during which the neighbor ridiculously preens before a mirror, is simply followed by what-happens-next information that is simultaneously banal and, therefore, pathetic. This conclusion is not confined to the final couplet, but rather to the last three lines: “At any rate, lately there's been some / Change in his schedule. He receives without zeal / Now, and judging by his refuse, eats little but oatmeal.”

The couplet itself rhymes with a dying fall, linking stressed “zeal” (what is lacking in the senile man's present existence) with the unstressed syllable in “oatmeal.” Thus, Glück's poem suggests that there is no solution, no resolution; there are only pathetic consequences. Indeed, that suggestion pervades the entire book as she moves from one static or degraded situation to another.

Glück's use of clever metrics rivals that of Plath or Lowell and reveals a clear difference between her work and that of Sexton, whose use of traditional form and rhyme is much less sophisticated, much less thoughtful. In other near-sonnets, the stanzaic shape is not so recognizably precise, and the number of lines may be thirteen or fifteen; however, the general movement and sense of timing is like that in “My Neighbor in the Mirror.” The poems' endings, although not always confined to the final couplet, arrive with swift viciousness.

Glück also reveals her debt to confessional poetry in the collection's persona poems. The persona poem has been a literary tool in personal classicism throughout the century, as I have shown, since it can allow a writer to unite personal, autobiographical material—tales of the self—with a mythological, allusive mask—tales of an other—and to finally seek shelter behind that mask. Yet persona poetry has played an important role in the work of the confessionals, as well. Its precise importance seems to vary from poet to poet—or from critic to critic, according to what particular definition each one ascribes to confessional work.

For those who maintain that confessional poetry must eventually transcend the solely personal in favor of the public, the persona poem's role is in the actual collection of poems, the book: through careful placement of persona poems among more personal ones, the poet builds a bridge out of the confines of the self and into the wider historical or sociological realm. A. R. Jones is representative of this attitude in his discussion of Lowell: “His most characteristic and successful effects have been achieved by his use of an escalating imagery that moves with easy assurance from personal experience into public and metaphysical meaning.” Not only imagery, but entire poems, such as Lowell's “The Banker's Daughter” or “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich” effect this movement into “public and metaphysical meaning.” Indeed, the whole arrangement of Life Studies, with Lowell's insistence upon history, reinforces such an appraisal. For the critic who sees confessional poetry as extremist, a term A. Alvarez favors, the persona poem may be a way to shock the reader, a kind of ultimate metaphor that implies something of psychosis, a splitting of the self. To probe into the thoughts—or pain—of the persona becomes another way to pursue disaster for the sake of new experience, another way to achieve what Alvarez called at one time “a murderous art.”⁶

In each of these cases, it would seem that what distinguishes the persona poem by the confessional artist from that by any other writer is not primarily an attribute of the poem itself but rather the fact that the writer also composed “real” confessional poems. Critics therefore see whatever thematic connections exist among the poems of both genres, and emphasize that thematic heart as the confessional interest. Robert Phillips includes among his characteristics of confessional poetry, “It is therapeutic and/or purgative,”⁷ and he might also have sought to establish a unity among a confessional writer's “autobiographic” and persona poems with this postulate.

But other critics and writers would probably discount such an intentional fallacy as a poor way to approach the confessional mode—the point of real art is not to provide an alternative to analysis or medication, although in meeting their own drives to create, to make, artists may, consequently, experience catharsis or purgation. Perhaps one of the best formulations is Williamson's description of the way “a subtle tissue of implicit psychological preoccupations links the impersonal poems to the personal ones, and helps give the impersonal ones a delicate complexity of feeling we have missed in some of the ontological lyrics that try to leave the specific self too completely behind.”⁸ Williamson emphasizes the continued interest in the personal, or interior, even while framing that interest amid the impersonal, or social—this is the heart of Glück's postconfessional personal classicism. What links the persona poems with the others in Firstborn is certainly theme but also tone. Like Plath's “Lady Lazarus,” the speakers are almost out of control, full of wild energy or anger. They do not participate in the understatement and calm tone of the later work any more than the early autobiographical poems do.

The book's second section, titled “The Edge,” contains most of the clearly identifiable persona poems in the collection. These speakers range from a race car driver's widow to a photojournalist of the Vietnam War; yet the diversity is introduced slowly, beginning with the section's title poem. This speaker is not very different from those in most poems throughout the book: she is a woman trapped in a destructive relationship with a man. A dramatic monologue, “The Edge” is full of imagery from other poems in the collection. Domestic yet discomforting, the setting includes bed, table, and house with all the attributes of success: lace table linens, roasts, bouquets. Yet the speaker remains “crippled,” her life a “waste.” What sets her apart from the speaker in poems of section one, “The Egg,” and section three, “Cottonmouth Country,” is that she is married; the destructiveness of her relationship with a man is now trapped in the ostensible tranquility of marriage. Glück chose this poem to open the section, seeming to imply quietly that all the speakers to follow, and their various troubles, are not really too different from those of anyone else. Thus Glück advances the personal themes found elsewhere from a slightly different perspective.

“My Life Before Dawn” is a striking example of a radically different perspective: the male narrator discusses the manner in which he jilted his lover, saying, “… I told her Sorry baby you have had / Your share. (I found her stain had dried into my hair.)” Yet he remains haunted by her memory, and at the poem's close she appears in his nightmares with all the vindictive power of Plath's “Lady Lazarus.” In the man's terrifying dreams, he has not been able to so easily cast her off.

One critic, attempting to argue a strictly confessional reading of the entire book, and likening Glück throughout to Sexton, sees in this poem a strange struggle between a female narrator and her mother, “a vampire risen from her childhood.”⁹ Yet this reading of the poem is insupportable, since the speaker begins

Sometimes at night I think of how we did
It, me nailed in her like steel, her
Over-eager on the striped contour
Sheet (I later burned it) …

(Firstborn, 24)

The opening obviously suggests violent sex, not childbirth. Certainly it demonstrates the danger in labeling a poet “confessional” and then attempting to apply to her work the rules Robert Phillips sets forth in his book-length study, the first of which is that “the emotions [confessional poets] portray are always true to their own feelings.”¹⁰ Such critics miss the point.

Glück portrays emotions that are not her own in order to imply the ones with which she sympathizes. Clearly, the male speaker is a voice representative of a type: men who use women. There is nothing about the poem that suggests what we usually consider to be confession in poetry. Even though the male speaker is, in fact, “confessing” his own macho boorishness and demonstrating that he cannot escape the result of his own actions, only a careless or contorted reading could lead one to assume that the poet identifies herself with the speaker. This poem lacks the insistent sense of witnessing, sharing, speaking from the central recesses of the self—what some critics call sincerity—that we find in some of her poems, such as “Easter Season.” It is, instead, a cunning—if not always well done—variation on the book's primary subject matter.

“My Life Before Dawn” employs the same compositional techniques as the other poems in Firstborn, however, and its tone reinforces its unity within the collection. In this poem we hear the same jerking, spiky enjambments, the same violent images that appear in the more autobiographical personal pieces. It is a kind of companion piece for “Hesitate to Call,” one of the first section's abortion poems, in which the poem's speaker is addressing a former lover who has left her pregnant. The title forms a bitter circular sentence with the final line, “Love, you ever want me, don't”—playing off the phrase, “don't hesitate to call.”

Both these poems—like all the poems in Firstborn—speak abruptly, both in their actual sentences and their use of the line. They are nearly all joyless, comfortless. They speak of the body and sex in terms of use, violence, and decay—without renewal—while syntax, diction, and lineation combine not merely to speak of pain, but to create its rhythms.

The great difference between Firstborn and Glück's later books lies largely in the tone Glück creates as she develops into a personal classicist. In his 1981 review of Glück's third book, Descending Figure, Calvin Bedient touched on this important change: “Glück's importance lies more and more in her stringency, which is an earnest of her truthfulness and courage. … What has grown upon her, insidiously and strengtheningly, is an ‘infamous calm.’” Yet this “infamous calm” actually began some years earlier with Glück's second collection, The House on Marshland (1975), a body of work that is simultaneously a break from her earliest style and a continuation of the same themes. As Helen Vendler wrote of the second collection, “Now, though a violent perception has not ceased, violent language has.” Three years later, Vendler expanded her description of Glück's tone, pointing out that the new poems' tone “owes nothing to Plath; it is not Lawrentian or clinical (Plath's two extremes.)”¹¹ Glück is clearly leaving behind her early debt to the language of the confessionals.

The new tone is subtle and ubiquitous; the calmness emphasizes tone as a way to embody stoicism and endurance, not suffering and victimization. It frequently employs understatement rather than the exaggerated metaphoric comparisons of Plath's confessional poetry or the angry insistence on lived detail of Adrienne Rich's. While some very personal autobiographical/narrative detail is important, each poem's strength seems built out of how very little detail is really allowed and how quietly the information is conveyed. Her understatement seems different from the kind of careful encoding earlier women writers relied upon. Glück does not appear interested in telling a carefully “slanted” truth; rather, she concentrates on bearing a quiet, though straightforward and honest, witness to the world—and to the world of selfhood. It is this ardent understatement in Louise Glück's mature poetry that constitutes her major contribution to the mode of personal classicism.

In a 1981 interview, Glück discussed these issues, revealing how she attempted to change the “mood” of her poetry.

When I finished the poems in [Firstborn,] it was clear to me that the thing I could not continue to do was make sentences like that. The earliest poems in The House on Marshland were responses to a dictum I made myself, to write poems that were, whenever possible, single sentences. I tried to force myself into latinate suspensions, into clauses. What it turned out to do was open up kinds of subject matter that I had not had access to.¹²

Her remarks reveal assumptions that fiction writers as well as poets have held for years: syntax creates a personality in the work, a distinctive mood or atmosphere. Thus Glück is focusing on an element even deeper in composition than the line—although the line is usually considered the primary unit of poetry—to effect real change in her work. She continues to explain that she wanted an effect in which “the sentences won't snap down like that, hard upon each other. The atmosphere of deadendedness will go.”¹³

Yet she also suggests a slight variation on the familiar wisdom offered by Charles Olson and Robert Creely—that form is only the extension of content. In changing her voice, her tone, Glück could “open up kinds of subject matter that [she] had not had access to.” Here the relationship is reversed in the process of composition, so that content does not merely demand its proper outward expression, but modes of expression can even suggest new possibilities of subject matter. There is not a great distinction between “form” and “mood” in this context; in many of Glück's poems, the “mood” is in fact the poem's subject, much the way the Objectivists and others see a poem's embodiment of material as its real subject. In the era of nonliterary analogues to form like the letter, the conversation, the dream, such as Jonathan Holden has suggested, choices in tone or mood can replace those of stanzaic form.¹⁴ While the choice between, for example, sonnet and sestina once established nuances of meaning about the world, such nuances are predominately established in contemporary poetry by other means.

What new subject matter was opened up by changes in syntax? Glück does not say, but I suggest it is the presence of the mythic, the archetypal, the legendary in our lives. It is once again a way to use the personal as a means to explore beyond the lonely, quotidian existence of the self; the personal is somewhat subordinated to the overarching world of myth. She shares this desire with many poets—H. D., of course, but there are also countless writers who are neither personal classicists nor confessional poets, yet who appeal to myth in their writing. A difference in Glück's later work is that even while the personal is placed within the mythic, the tone of the poem and the structure of the book suggest that the personal remains the point of the poetry, its heart or center, rather than simply providing a means to achieve the more imposing and important mythic. As I have shown, the same impulse remains true to some extent in H. D.'s work as well; her poems “about” mythic characters still focus privately on her. But Glück goes to less elaborate means to mask her own experience behind recognizable mythic characters, though the two share a common interest.

In the opening poem of Marshland, “All Hallows,” pacing, details, and vocabulary all bespeak something ancient, as out of Old World folktale.

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree.

(House on Marshland, 3)

This poem embodies precisely what Robert Bly talks about in his discussion of the image as arm, or that through which the non-human universe enters the human by way of an image. It is also indicative of what he calls the metaphor of “forgotten relationships”: “Ancient man stood in the center of a wheel of relations coming to the human being from objects. The Middle Ages were aware of a relationship between a woman's body and a tree, and Jung reproduces in one of his books an old plate showing a woman taking a baby from a tree trunk.” Indeed, Glück seems to have learned something from the deep imagist poets like Bly and James Wright which shows in her introduction of the mythic into her work.¹⁵ Deep imagery allows preservation of the personal quality, the personal voice, even where the rational self disappears in a moment of psychic or mythic revelation. Glück has a similar goal for her work as she moves away from confessionalism and toward personal classicism.

In a grossly reductive sense, there is little difference between the subject of “All Hallows”—the creation of children—and that of the domestic, familial poems in Firstborn. But such an equation would belie the poem's actual achievement. In Anna Wooten's words, “The topical matter of the two volumes is similar; the treatment is not.”¹⁶ “All Hallows” is explorative and, if not exactly celebratory, at least full of awe. The destructive anger throughout Firstborn made both these qualities impossible; instead, the volume remained mostly assertive, declarative.

In the 1981 interview, Glück says, “My tendency—as is obvious—is to very promptly build mythic structures, to see the resemblance of the present moment to the archetypal configuration. So that almost immediately the archetypal configuration is superimposed.”¹⁷ Although I do not mean to imply that Glück consciously took the earlier personal classicist as an influence—Glück herself never has suggested such a connection—her description of her own method sounds very like what we have seen in H. D.'s work. One subtle difference, however, is that, for Glück, the “almost immediate” superimposition of the archetypal takes place within the poem itself, whereas within H. D.'s shorter poems, the connection seems more often to take place earlier, within the writer's earliest conceptions of the poem—even before the writing begins—and so the superimposition appears in the poem as a substitution of the archetypal for the present moment. The process Glück describes may be applied more accurately to H. D.'s longer poems than to those under discussion in chapter 1.

Glück's tendency is, in fact, not “obvious,” perhaps not even realized, until the poems in the second book. Before Marshland, Glück did not really achieve what her teacher Stanley Kunitz maintains is his own goal in poetry: “to use the life in order to transcend it, to convert it into legend.” Her achievement, beginning with Marshland, is the “fusion” of both the “personal and mythical,” thereby “rescuing the poems from either narrow self-glorification or pedantic myopia.”¹⁸

Some critics—perhaps most notably Judith Kroll—argue that Sylvia Plath's goal is actually to transcend her own biography, to create an entire legend or mythology of her own self.¹⁹ This is indeed one way to approach her poems, and one that would seem to equate Glück's aim with that of Plath, but it is a critical stance concerned only with imagery and symbolism, not with tone. As most readers of Plath will surely concede, one of the most striking aspects of her most wellknown poems is their development of a tone that is extreme—almost out of control—in its mood. It is as if in order to transcend, Plath feels she must create a runaway roller-coaster of language that will finally hurl the self to a larger plane of existence. Nothing could be further from a personal classicist approach. Glück's shift to postconfessional classicism is initially a way to leave behind the extremist sound of her earlier poetry.

A poem from the second half of Marshland is a fine example of the way Glück fuses the personal with the legendary in pursuit of a thematic goal similar to that of Plath but using the postconfessional language of ardent understatement. “The Letters” focuses upon the ending of a romance between a man and a woman, full of symbolic imagery (the time of year is almost autumn) but in a voice that is not that of Everywoman but of a single, profoundly personal individual.

It is night for the last time.
For the last time your hands
gather on my body.
Tomorrow it will be autumn.
We will sit together on the balcony
watching the dry leaves drift over the village
like the letters we will burn,
one by one, in our separate houses.
Such a quiet night.
Only your voice murmuring
You're wet, you want to
and the child
sleeps as though he were not born.
In the morning it will be autumn.
We will walk together in the small garden
among stone benches and the shrubs
still sheeted in mist
like furniture left for a long time.
Look how the leaves drift in the darkness.
We have burned away
all that was written on them.

(House on Marshland, 40)

The stately pronouncements of the first lines suggest an utter finality that is reinforced by the coming of autumn and by the comparison of the way “the child” sleeps—he is given no proper name, not even the identification “our” or “my” son—to a state of nonbeing, not even born. Yet the world is not merely defined by primeval portents: the familiar shapes in the yard appear in language firmly of the present age, “like furniture left for a long time.”

The poem even comments upon the calmness that informs it. “Such a quiet night” sounds natural, like real inner thought; gently trochaic, it ends in a stressed syllable that, like everything else about this poem, implies finality and restraint. It is useful to compare this poem to one of Plath's on a similar subject to see and hear the real difference in tone and execution. Here are the last few lines of “Burning the Letters”:

Warm rain greases my hair, extinguishes nothing.
My veins glow like trees.
The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like—A red
          burst and a cry
That splits from its ripped bag and does not stop
With the dead eye
And the stuffed expression, but goes on
Dyeing the air,
Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water
What immortality is. That it is immortal.(20)

These two poems depict quite different emotional states: Plath sees the event's loud, terrible violence, and both her imagery and syntax reveal this, while Glück sees the silence, the understatement, the stoically controlled sadness to be the appropriate setting for such an activity as burning a lover's letters. The bitter anger or jagged grief we might have expected had “The Letters” appeared in Firstborn has been sublimated into a reticent willingness to simply bear, to endure, which is, perhaps, a path to greater reflection and understanding. Yet the language of endurance becomes even more pronounced in Glück's next collection, Descending Figure. Indeed, this path leads forward through most of Glück's subsequent work, including her most recent collection, Ararat, which continues to examine calmly what it means in a human life—a woman's, specifically—to abide and survive the losses that comprise life, even while the book moves toward a greater biographic inclusion.

Although Glück herself says that she consciously worked to alter the way she wrote sentences, her second collection reflects a different use of the poetic line, as well. In these later poems, enjambment usually works to pull the poem naturally forward, in the rhythms and breaths of speech dominated not by anger, but by meditation. The use of sound throughout the line is more delicate, more musical, relying on the inner texture of assonance and consonance, and where rhyme is present it is generally internal—a marked change from the earlier poems' heavy reliance on end rhyme. Here are a few indicative lines from the first section of “The Shad-blow Tree”:

It is all here,
luminous water, the imprinted sapling
matched, branch by branch,
to the lengthened
tree in the lens, as it was
against the green, poisoned landscape.

(House on Marshland, 9)

This language is a pleasure to read aloud, in a way none of the poems in Firstborn are. Glück places liquids throughout, sounds appropriate to this landscape of water and plant. The repetition of the “a” sound, with its accompanying internal near-rhyme “matched” and “branch” on the same line, creates a structure of connectedness, not the interruption Glück calls “deadendedness.” Even the small technical matter of initial capitalization has changed in order to emphasize flow. Throughout Firstborn, the only occasions where the first word of each line was not capitalized were those words that were themselves divided by the line break (“photogen / ic”); yet in Marshland, it is the sentence, not the line, that determines capitalization. Such a change is not really radical, and may appear to be only cosmetic, but it is clearly a deliberate part of the new “mood” Glück wanted to create.

Of course, there are still some traces of the abruptly syncopated rhythms and angers in the second book; the transformation in mood continues throughout the two subsequent collections, rather than appearing immediately as a fait accompli. For example, “The Murderess” strikes one as a poem that could have been included in Firstborn. This is a dramatic monologue whose speaker addresses the commissioner, explaining why she has murdered her daughter. Like the many persona poems in the first collection, its language and imagery reveal the psychic workings of the speaker. The rhythm here is both rocking and self-interrupting, as in the opening lines: “You call me sane, insane—I tell you men / were leering to themselves; she saw.”²¹ The caesura before the last two words enhances the emphatic end to the sentence, an end punctuated in anger and wild perception. “The Murderess” uses longer lines to let the phrases build an energy other than simply friction, and the implication for the entire poem is that language is not at the verge of combustion, as it is in the earlier poems. Still, there are remnants of slant rhyme in the poem's twelve lines, never so abrupt as those in the poems of Firstborn, but still exerting their disquieting force: “men/brain”; “saw/grew”; “pare/Fear”; “talked/lent”; “day/body.” This poem stands out as a link between Glück's early and later styles.

Glück's publishing record reveals further the process of transition as she worked to develop her personal classicist style. Some of the poems from Marshland appeared in periodicals prior to their collection in slightly different forms, including initial capitalization of each line, less modulated diction, and different line breaks. “Gretel in Darkness,” for example, appeared first in 1969, six years before the book's publication. The initial published version retains her early style of capitalizing the first word in each line. This practice imparts an added sense of interruption to the pause introduced by the line break. Glück shifted to lowercase initial letters in Marshland, emphasizing her abandonment of the choppy anger in Firstborn. Another change toward the poem's end reveals Glück's movement toward greater understatement. In the version in New American Review, Gretel addresses her brother emphatically, calling him to remember their shared past:

But I killed for you.
I see armed firs,
The spires of that gleaming kiln—
come back! come back!
Nothing changes. Nights I turn to you to hold me
But you are not there.(22)

In Marshland, Glück deletes the melodramatic “Nothing changes,” and makes the first line longer, a more extended unit of speech. She also has removed the wild exclamation and ominous explanation:

But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln—
Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.

(House on Marshland, 5)

The changes in the final version published in Marshland are specifically intended to alter the voice—or rather the tone of voice—of the speaker, and to lead to a quieter, calmer mood throughout the entire collection. That calm is “infamous” in part because it is not an easy calm; instead, it is achieved through an effort of will, a deliberate attempt at stoicism. We have seen versions of this calm in the work of other personal classicists: while I have already pointed out the similarity to Bogan's stoic stance, I should call attention as well to the quiet courage in Bishop's work where she seems to steel herself into personal statement, in poems like “One Art.” In spite of similarity, however, Glück's tone is distinctive; in contrast to her earlier heavy reliance on influences, she works to develop syntax and timbre that sound like no one but herself. We see that through a deliberate change in her work, she is overcoming the “threat” Williamson suggested that the popularity of confessional poetry posed for younger writers.

In addition to these revisions, Glück decided to omit certain poems published in periodicals during the years between Firstborn, and the appearance of Marshland from the second collection. Glück's decision seems to have been guided by her stated desire to take the new book in a truly new direction from that which she had already traveled. The following poem appeared in Antaeus in 1975, next to “Here Are My Black Clothes,” which was later included in the book.

“JUKEBOX”

You hot, honey, do she bitch and crab,
her measly and depriving body holding back
your rights? How many years? You chicken, upright
in your suit. You starve, you starve.
Here the night fill with howling, mister,
all those dreams come true in O
the sweetest sound, you say the word, you stuff
one dollar in the slot.(23)

Read aloud, “Jukebox” is certainly “bullet-like,” like the spiky persona poems in Firstborn's second section, such as “The Islander.” Whereas transitional poems like “The Murderess” or “Here Are My Black Clothes” earn their inclusion, perhaps, due to their clear allusions to mythic implications of our lives, “Jukebox” is a lesser poem—merely startling in its street-tough language—and so it seems appropriate that it is excluded from Marshland.

It might be useful here to draw a comparison from a discussion of prose narration. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth uses the term implied author to refer to the picture a reader creates of the author, based on a particular novel. Each novel a writer creates will imply a different “version” of the author, and these “versions” are to be distinguished from the terms persona. mask, and narrator, each of which refers to only one of the elements of the entire work, and not that concentration of the writer's creative self that lies behind the finished whole—plot, characters, timing, and all. Why bother to distinguish the implied author at all, when there are so many terms much easier to distinguish that account for the mechanical, technical, and rhetorical strategies in the novel? Because, explains Booth:

It is only by distinguishing between the author and his implied image that we can avoid pointless and unverifiable talk about such qualities as ‘sincerity’ or ‘seriousness’ in the author. … we have only the work as evidence for the only kind of sincerity that concerns us: Is the implied author in harmony with himself—that is, are his other choices in harmony with his explicit narrative character?²⁴

Here we see a rather New Critical-style reliance on the text itself, in Booth's emphasis on the “version” of the author implied by, even contained in, a novel. And even though a collection of poetry is different from a novel in its presentation of so many “complete” units—the poems—it is similarly helpful to consider the implied author of Marshland as distinct from the speakers of the lyrics, as well as from each persona present in the collection (Jeanne d'Arc, Abishag, the Murderess, etc.). Thus one can avoid unverifiable discussions of “sincerity” that would rely on Robert Phillips's premise: “The emotions [confessional poets] portray are always true to their own feelings.”²⁵ Instead, the important aesthetic consideration of sincerity in a collection of poetry like Marshland is this: does each individual poem sound as if it is the truth? This question shouldn't imply a cynical situation where it sounds like truth but is not; another way to phrase the question might be: does each poem convince a reader that it is intended to present truth? “Myth,” of course, has unfortunately come to mean “untruth” or even “lie” in contemporary vocabulary, but mythology has always been full of psychic, cultural truth, and I mean to include that level.

A follow-up question would paraphrase Booth: Is the implied author of the entire collection in harmony with herself? Does a resonant coherence link the various individual poems? Such questions belong to a study of a book of poetry, distinct from examinations of individual poems. They will help shape my discussion of Descending Figure, The Triumph of Achilles, and Ararat, all of which are fully mature works. I find that they do meet the aesthetic criteria abstracted from Booth. And while The House on Marshland is less strikingly unified in this manner, it introduces, in dramatic contrast, Glück's beginnings to achieve a harmonious sincerity that is both mythic and personal.

Descending Figure (1980) continues to develop a postconfessional idiom, classically interested in circumfusing the self with the archetypal. With her third book, Glück shows a keen interest in the book itself as a form which, because it allows for repetition of imagery and theme as one poem follows another, can permit the poet even greater reticence and understatement in individual poems. The collection as a whole may make clear what a single poem may leave obscure. Thus, a poet need not create the commanding presence of explanation typical of confessional poems. Williamson finds confessional poems to be essentially “a kind of true dramatic monologue.”²⁶ Such monologues are finally intent upon explaining—even justifying—the speaker's point of view in a way the personal classicist poem is not.

This third collection received more critical notice than had her two previous books and for good reason: it is a solidly crafted book, with a greater inner unity than Marshland and much more maturity and depth than the precocious Firstborn. Many reviewers noted the collection's interest in art—not merely poetry, but the visual and plastic arts as well. As Dave Smith wrote, “Descending Figure is a book about art before it is about anything else because art is the answer to ‘the cries of hunger’ which myth wants to systematically accommodate. Poem after poem addresses the aliases of art (illusions, perceptions, qualities) and is a ceremony which attempts to fix both the known and the way of knowing.”²⁷

Smith touches on another important aspect of the book—the interest in hunger, especially the willed hunger of anorexia—as a way to pursue “perfection.” It is also, of course, a way to deny or suppress the physical self and to seek a sterner, leaner participation in the world that Glück calls “the dying order.” More than one reviewer remembered Pound's phrase about poetry “where painting or sculpture seems as if it were just coming over into speech,” because of the spareness of her work, the deliberate quiet, the intense concision. Yet all this emphasis on order is not an avoidance of complexity in favor of the quotidian, but rather, as Steven Yenser points out in a review, a commitment to “linguistic torsion.”²⁸

Glück creates this complexity through placing the collection's poems sequentially in a tightly interconnecting texture. We see in miniature this emphasis on placement in Glück's use of the poem sequence, an important formal development largely ignored by the other personal classicists in this study: H. D. explores the possibility of long poems in Trilogy, but she does not achieve Glück's intensity nor her interest in articulation through silence. In 1978, Helen Vendler commented that she wished Glück would write a long poem; her hopes may have been met with some of Glück's work that followed shortly thereafter.²⁹ In Descending Figure, there are four of these longer poems comprised of subtitled sections: “The Garden,” “Descending Figure,” “Dedication to Hunger,” and “Lamentations.” I want to begin with the sequence that Glück herself singles out for discussion, “The Garden.”

In Alberta Turner's Fifty Contemporary Poets, Glück tells something of the poem's composition. She began, she says, with the final section, “The Fear of Burial,” which was written in response to a workshop assignment in her writing circle: to write a poem about fear. As the other sections subsequently came,

my concept of the poem changed several times during the three months spent writing it. … Once the piece was assembled, the individual sections were pruned here and there. Initially I had wanted each section to be capable of standing on its own. After several workshop sessions I came to feel I couldn't have both independent poems and a longer coherent work … From this point all editorial adjustments were made in the interest of the long piece.³⁰

The “long piece” has received prominent placement in Glück's work. “The Garden” was published first in Antaeus in 1975—the same year that The House on Marshland appeared—and it has undergone only the slightest change in its subsequent appearances: a chap-book published by Antaeus Editions, dedicated to Stanley Kunitz, and the title piece in the first section of Descending Figure. From its first appearance to its third, only tiny revisions have been made: a comma has been removed and a period changed to a question mark. Clearly Glück saw the poem as a completed whole early on and remained satisfied with its unity. She was not alone in her opinion of its importance among her work; William Doreski called it “The most ambitious poem in her new book,” further describing it as “a miracle of compression, a tight allegory composed of complex metaphors that evoke both the Biblical creation myth and the modern myth of self-creation.”³¹

“The Garden,” with its five subtitled sections (“The Fear of Birth,” “The Garden,” “The Fear of Love,” “Origins,” “The Fear of Burial”), practically shimmers in myth, from the title, evoking Eden, to the concluding section, “The Fear of Burial,” picturing the soul after it has left the body. It is, in spite of its generally simple syntax and hushed language, a difficult poem, not unlike Bishop's “Four Poems” discussed in chapter four. Yet unlike “Four Poems,” it achieves an importance of unity, setting out many of the themes and images to recur throughout the entire book. Birth, the body and its myriad mutabilities, fear, the fatalistic responsibilities of adulthood: all these appear in the “The Garden”'s first section and will return throughout the book.

In talking about the poems of Descending Figure, Glück says, “I realize I have a craving for that which is immutable. The physical world is mutable. So, you cast about for those situations, or myths, that will answer the craving.”³² In fact, “The Garden” does not “answer”—does not, that is, provide a solution or at least a consolation for—this craving so much as it simply articulates it. In the first section, the unborn body “could not content itself / with health,” and so is seen to have willed its fall from real “health,” or safety in the womb.

As the sequence proceeds, in the section also titled “The Garden,” the speaker addresses “you,” presumably a lover who has gone into the garden that “admires you”: “… Yet / there is still something you need, / your body so soft, so alive, among the stone animals.” The human body is not self-sufficient, and its various needs or hungers will recur in the pages to follow. Yet “The Garden” mitigates the fear of death with its final line, in which the deathless perfection of the stone animals—lawn ornaments that have achieved mythic proportions—is not, finally, envied: “Admit that it is terrible to be like them, / beyond harm.”

In section three, “The Fear of Love,” we do, perhaps, see the introduction of something to “answer the craving.” This is surely one of the poems Helen Vendler had in mind when she wrote, in the rear cover blurb, of “the invention of religion” as a theme for the book. As this section continues to develop the imagery that pervades Descending Figure, the human body itself has become like stone, seemingly through its weariness, a kind of paralysis, rather than a true immutability. The lovers, no longer in the spring of the garden, imagine that they lie partially buried in the snow, escaping the earthly, mortal cast of their own shadows in a world of light. When, dressed in feathers, the gods come “down / from the mountain we built for them,” they are descending figures, and are a kind of “answer” to mortal craving and fear. They come, therefore, in response to the two preceding sections as well as that in which they appear: through the poem sequence, Glück establishes the basic interconnectedness that pervades Descending Figure.

The next section picks up where “The Fear of Love” left off, with the speaker supposing that a comforting voice—like that of a mother or a benevolent god—has just spoken.

“ORIGINS”

As though a voice were saying
You should be asleep by now—
But there was no one. Nor
had the air darkened,
though the moon was there,
already filled in with marble.
.....And yet you could not sleep,
poor body, the earth
still clinging to you—

(Descending Figure, 7)

This section continues the sequence's allusion to—or reconfiguration of—the Genesis myth; throughout these stanzas, however, the god is absent and the voice wistful and bereft. Here we find Genesis in the existentialist age, or, conversely, existentialism even from the time of origins. Glück continues her development of the idea of the body, so important throughout the collection. The body is a kind of contemporary kenning for the “you,” a momentary reduction of the self to mere body, newly formed from the earth. In other poems she returns to the matter of origination, through sex, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, childhood; but here she relies on the details from Genesis: man wrought from the clay of the earth.

“The Fear of Burial,” the sequence's concluding section, extends the details from “Origins”'s last lines. The body, risen from the earth into life, is now imagined after death, while Glück introduces a Cartesian mind/body—or Christian soul/body—dualism, yet her language continues to imply the pantheistic.

In the empty field, in the morning,
the body waits to be claimed.
The spirit sits beside it, on a small rock—
nothing comes to give it form again.
Think of the body's loneliness.
At night pacing the sheared field,
its shadow buckled tightly around.
Such a long journey.
And already the remote, trembling lights of the village
not pausing for it as they scan the rows.
How far away they seem,
the wooden doors, the bread and milk
laid like weights on the table.

(Descending Figure, 8)

Loneliness is the condition of death, and Glück imagines that loneliness as activity of both the body and the spirit; the body must “journey,” must “[pace] the sheared field.” The spirit, too, is surely lonely, since it sits alone while “nothing comes to give it form again,” but the section's longer stanza delineates the body's loneliness, not specifically the spirit's. Thus Glück sets the pattern for examining emotions through the language of the body, which she will later define as “hunger.” Although Descending Figure is peopled with gods and with the dead, Glück continues to write of them in sensate terms of the body and a physical understanding of the world. She is much like H. D. in this respect; to H. D., as to Glück, mythic subject matter is vital, alive with present meaning and embodiment.

Even while she sets a pattern early in the collection, she does not fully reveal the metaphorical resonance of the images and language that constitute that pattern. As Jay Parini points out, Glück's technique owes something to the symbolists: she “cannot be pinned to a specific interpretation” since “other meanings radiate” from whatever appears to be an individual poem's subject.³³ That radiation permeates the entire collection, effectively linking each poem to all the others in a complex texture of imagery and statement. Glück uses the book as a form much as she does the poem sequence: a tightly woven tissue of connected imagery, tone, and theme which adds up to more than the sum of its individual poems. And she uses the book to a greater formal purpose than the other writers in this study. The small bound typescript of poems from “The Islands series” was never published during H. D.'s life. After her first two books, Bogan published essentially “new and collected” editions; Bishop was more pains-taking in arranging her collections, as the inclusion of “In the Village” within Questions of Travel suggests, yet even she does not achieve the degree of intraconnectedness we find in Descending Figure.

Not all readers admire Glück's thorough intra-allusiveness. One reviewer, Elizabeth Maraffino, availed herself of an opportunity to criticize what she saw as an unfortunate direction American poetry was taking, a direction of which Louise Glück's latest work was representative. Her characterization of Glück's technique is fairly accurate, though cursory:

Each poem is tightly constructed: lines break with hairline precision; no useless phrases litter page or mind; images are as carefully positioned within the chamber of each poem as each object within a Cezanne still life—they are in keeping with the tessitura of the poem, never strident and shrill, never too muted, above all never off hand.³⁴

Maraffino does not care for Glück's achievement with these techniques, holding that Glück misses an important opportunity, failing to allow for any “long digression—10 pages of digression if necessary” in order to fully explore all the minute connotations and denotations implied in each element of careful phrasing.

The review occasioned some energetic letters to the editor of the American Book Review. John Hawkes attempted to explain the intricacies of Glück's method this way:

Glück calls a spade a spade but not in a way that would break old-fashioned personal pride, or, for that matter, would weaken her poems as works of art. Is one an academic, ‘distant,’ simply because one doesn't let it all hang out?

If Maraffino went back and read these poems over word for word and, then, line to line, she might come to see her own ‘missed opportunity!’ Why say more than is necessary unless one is appealing to a very unimaginative audience? Children come instantly to mind as a group where one often has to repeat oneself and to take things to the very last common denominator. This more often resembling a chant than intelligent lyricism.³⁵

As Hawkes makes bitingly clear, Glück's mode of postconfessional classicism by design does not load the lyric with narrative detail, emotional digression, or, simply, explanation. Instead, she allows her vision to resonate quietly, without overt signposts, among an entire collection of poems, in which each poem adds a slight variation upon the way an image or an idea has been treated elsewhere.

The book's title, Descending Figure, also exemplifies this approach. Glück explains that although she had several poems written for a third book, she was working with no idea of a title until she read an interview with Paul Simon published in Rolling Stone, in which he mentioned the musical term descending figure. She explains:

I was immensely haunted by the phrase, its implications and resonances. I think that from the moment I had that title, I assumed it would be the title for my next book. A phrase likely to typify my work … there's the feeling of minor key, a kind of irrevocable darkening, a moving down the scale.³⁶

In music, the term refers to a figure, a smaller unit of notes than a phrase, that repeats at progressively lower pitches throughout the work. It is not exactly a variation on a theme, since the pattern of notes does not change. It is more nearly a repetition of the theme voiced at a different level, in a slightly different context, so to speak. Glück has said that her preference for subtlety and context emerged in her earliest experiences of reading poetry as a child: “I liked scale but I liked it invisible. I loved those poems that seemed so small on the page, yet swelled in the mind.”³⁷ I also find it significant that Glück chooses musical analogies to discuss her work: “minor key, moving down the scale.” Her choice implies her constant awareness of sound's importance.

The “descending figure” does indeed have many implications and resonances throughout the collection. The first poem, “The Drowned Children,” speaks of the children's bodies slowly descending through the water. The descending figure is also the angel of death—or the dead sister who returns as a spiritual presence. Because of its musical definition, the phrase also emphasizes the book's interest in art. The gods themselves are descending figures, as they come down the mountain in “The Fear of Love.” That descent is reversed in the book's final poem, “The Clearing,” where “at last God arose, His great shadow / darkening the sleeping bodies of His children, / and leapt into heaven.”

As the title resonates throughout these different contexts, some implications remain constant. The small collection of musical notes that constitute a figure are not static matter: they are sound, energy. But the power of the metaphor that names them for us gives them tangible shape—a figure, a body. Similarly, Glück's work returns repeatedly to what is noncorporeal: the spiritual, the religious, the emotional. Yet the language with which she speaks of these non-physical subjects is the language of a mortal, full of the metaphor of the body. The word “body” or its plural occurs twenty-four times; “flesh” occurs three. In a book of only forty-eight pages, some of those simply title pages bearing no poems, this means that explicit naming of the body occurs on average more than every other page, a very insistent presence.

Glück says, “My poems are vertical poems. They aspire and they delve. They don't elaborate, or amplify.”³⁸ This is quite true of the individual poems; only through the implied connections within the collection do we see anything resembling elaboration, and even then the word more properly would be variation, I think. There is something of the modernist passion for juxtaposition in her method: the desire to present rather than to explain, for simple linkage rather than careful transition. All the personal classicists have ties to mainstream modernism, whether an attraction to subject matter, as in the renewed interest in classical mythology and intellectualism of H. D.'s and Bogan's work, or an exploration of new formal—or tonal—possibilities that free verse offered, as in Bishop's.

The poem sequence gives Glück a way to realize one of her earliest interests in poetry: as a child, she says, she was not interested in words themselves, but in contexts. “What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by the means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning.”³⁹ Thus her exploration of the poem sequence—an exploration of contexts—fulfills an old interest in language.

The title sequence, “Descending Figure,” consists of three titled sections that together, like “The Garden,” offer spare, locally delimited occurrences of themes that pervade the entire book, most notably hunger; language and writing; the power of names; death. The first section, “The Wanderer,” combines death of the sister, and the speaker's own accompanying knowledge of loneliness, with the need for names and for writing.

At twilight I went into the street.
The sun hung low in the iron sky,
ringed with cold plumage.
If I could write to you
about this emptiness—
Along the curb, groups of children
were playing in the dry leaves.
Long ago, at this hour, my mother stood
at the lawn's edge, holding my little sister.
Everyone was gone; I was playing
in the dark street with my other sister,
whom death had made so lonely.
Night after night we watched the screened porch
filling with a gold, magnetic light.
Why was she never called?
Often I would let my own name glide past me
though I craved its protection.

(Descending Figure, 11)

The setting, “ringed with cold plumage,” indicates that once again we are in the world where the quotidian present merges with the world of myth. In its echo of the Old English poem, the title enhances this sense of the old, the archetypal. And out of that setting, the speaker's need to write, to name, to describe and therefore perhaps transcend loneliness erupts in a sentence she cannot even complete. The speaker's loneliness—emptiness—is not unlike that of the dead sister; the speaker actually wills herself to experience more fully that terrible loneliness, earlier imagined in “The Fear of Burial”: she stands in the dusk, apart from the “gold, magnetic light” at the house, and does not take refuge and comfort from her own name. Instead, she stands silent, as if she is not a living, loved daughter being called home.

“The Sick Child,” the second section of “Descending Figure,” also focuses on death. Attributed by epigraph to the Rijksmuseum, it is ostensibly a description of a painting. The first ten lines are simple, objective description of a child sleeping in her mother's arms and of the winter night surrounding them. Steven Yenser points out, however, that

no painting in that museum corresponds to Glück's scene. In the one that comes closest, “The Sick Child” by Gabriel Metsu, the child looks feverishly out at the observer, while in Glück's poem “The mother … stares / fixedly into the bright museum.” Maybe her memory is at fault; but it seems to me possible that whatever else she means, she intends to condense and to extend her complicated relationship to her dead sister.⁴⁰

I think Yenser is quite right about the connection to the sister; the poem itself shows, in the next seven lines, that it has left the world of the painting—or entered it so completely and imaginatively as to render the placement in the Rijksmuseum unimportant. Yet the connection is not stated, only implied.

By spring the child will die.
Then it is wrong, wrong
to hold her—
Let her be alone,
without memory, as the others wake
terrified, scraping the dark
paint from their faces.

(Descending Figure, 12)

Suddenly the poem casts free from the present into the realm of foreknowledge, and from the human world of comfort and compassion of a mother for a sick child to an awful imperative that extends compassion beyond the mortal realm. The end thus urges that the child be left alone in her fated life, since she must die soon, in order that she may be “without memory,” and therefore unable to fully experience her own loneliness, never having not been alone.

Yenser also points out that the final section, “For My Sister,” reveals the speaker acting as a mother to the child.⁴¹ These different contexts explore the various relationships among different generations of women; thus the “descending figure” also implies movement through time, through generations.

Far away my sister is moving in her crib.
The dead ones are like that,
always the last to quiet.
.....Now, if she had a voice,
the cries of hunger would be beginning.
I should go to her;
perhaps if I sang very softly,
her skin so white,
her head covered with black feathers. … [ellipsis Glück's]

(Descending Figure, 13)

The poem's final image—white skin and head covered with black feathers—visually links back to the last lines in the preceding section, “scraping the dark / paint from their faces,” and to the earlier image of the gods “in their cloaks of feathers.” This reappearance of imagery surely is an example of what Glück perceives as a “figure” descending through her poetry. Glück creates this densely inter-woven texture of imagery throughout the book, as one image recalls and prepares for another. Thus, for this personal classicist, even imagery is a method of understatement.

She interweaves her themes and subject matter just as densely and quietly as she does her imagery. In “For My Sister,” Glück imagines that if the dead sister could speak, “the cries of hunger would be beginning.” Hunger asserts itself repeatedly in different settings in the later poems, and becomes a figure for artistic shaping. In a poem titled “Epithalamium,” she writes of “the terrible charity of marriage,” and in this context she sees “So much pain in the world—the formless / grief of the body, whose language / is hunger—.”

Throughout Descending Figure, Glück presents a theme similar to that of Firstborn, while she continues to explore different sorts of articulation. Marriage is a union of only bodies and sex is an irresistible urge that is not celebratory, but wounding, humiliating, and inexorable. To a certain extent, all human relations except that between mother and child are depicted in these terms. In “Tango,” the speaker describes the relationship between sisters as a state of inseparability that is nonetheless wounding: she writes of a moon that is “brutal and sisterly.” The sisters are “actively starving,” says the speaker; their hunger is the hunger not of sexual desire, but nonetheless of a desire to join, to either absorb or be absorbed. This section's final image is of the trees “disfigured” in the moonlight, emphasizing through imagery the fact that one thing—or person—can so easily disfigure another.

Whatever is inseparable is beyond control, and although Glück does not say it in so many words, she shows control to be the language of the spirit or soul. Hunger, she says explicitly, is “the language of the body”: willed hunger is a kind of desperate articulation then, and anorexia becomes one of the important themes and metaphors of the book, exploring that strange middle ground where the bodily and the spiritual grapple. Whereas the corporeal speaks through desires and hungers, the spirit continually attempts to overcome the body's needs through mastery and denial. Such an approach to life is the only one that appears possible to the anorexic woman, and throughout much of the book we see the anorexic's own peculiar brand of existentialism informing the poetry's aesthetic.

As I have shown in the work of all the writers treated in this study, personal classicism is a mode dedicated to creating a shielding or controlling context—formal and thematic—for what is essentially quite personal poetry. Behind this dedication lies a supposition that personal poetry is somehow too vulnerable, too revealing, too seemingly unprofessional—in some way in need of a complementary dose of the impersonal. In Glück's adoption of anorexia as both subject matter and aesthetic approach, we see a brilliant use of the social forces that impel women—and women writers—to seek to efface the personal, even their very persons. Susie Orbach has written on the metaphoric implications of anorexia in contemporary culture.

A girl grows up learning to turn her own needs into the servicing of needs in others. She becomes accustomed to restricting her initiatives to those areas that are a response to others' declared needs. As a result she loses touch with her own needs so that they become not only repressed but unrecognized and undeveloped. More damaging, perhaps, she takes on the idea that needs that do arise from within her are somehow wrong, and that she herself is all wrong for having them.

The food refusal can be seen to be a graphic gagging of desire, a block on having what is so wanted. It becomes a model for deprivation in all areas. “If I can successfully deny myself food, I will be able to crush the other desires that arise in me.” The determination associated with the refusal of food is much more than the expression of will, it is an example of the brake on desire in general that exists in the woman. It is a measure of perceived restriction in other areas of self-expression.⁴²

As Orbach makes clear, anorexia is a struggle for control, not a matter of appetite loss. The body, in its physicality, is a seat of desire that must not go unchecked: the anorexic woman has internalized society's notions that women must be physically diminutive and pleasing to the extent that she sees her flesh as a monstrous enemy, an impediment to legitimate selfhood and happiness. “The body is experienced as an object that must be controlled or it will control,” explains Orbach.⁴³ In other words, the physical desires of the body, especially for food, must be thwarted and denied or else they will retain too much power over an individual. The anorexic's struggle is a power struggle.

Throughout Descending Figure, Glück combines the writer's aesthetic search for a poetry reflecting postconfessional willed understatement with the anorexic's drive for control of physical desires. Helen Vendler has called Glück's technique indicative of a “renunciatory aesthetic” which is involved in “the acquiring, by renunciation, of a self.”⁴⁴ In defining the language of the body as hunger, Glück fuses interest in linguistic/artistic mastery with that of physical restraint. In doing so, she explores the artistic extension of the anorexic's drive to refuse and reject.

Glück herself uses language very like Vendler's. “The tragedy of anorexia seems to me that its intent is not self-destructive, though its outcome so often is. Its intent is to construct, in the only way possible when means are so limited, a plausible self.”⁴⁵ Glück identifies the anorexic's method of self-determination as a force of negation, of denial, of destroying the physical, public self in order to affirm a private, inner one. The act of will required to achieve such a goal can only be maintained through rigid ritual and self-discipline; the artist's method, similarly, is dedicated to the pursuit of perfection. As Glück says in “The Deviation,” section four of “Dedication to Hunger,” what the artist feels in “aligning these words” on a page—in constructing a coherent vision through poetry—is the pull of self-discipline an anorexic feels in trying to construct a “plausible self.”

The first section of “Dedication to Hunger” is titled “From the Suburbs”: it serves to locate the poem solidly in the landscape of post-war American culture.

The little girl purposefully
swinging her arms, laughing
her stark laugh:
It should be kept secret, that sound.
It means she's realized
that he never touches her.
She is a child; he could touch her
if he wanted to.

(Descending Figure, 29)

In this opening section we see a little of what is important about the suburbs in forming a woman's dedication to hunger—the family structure: mother, whose pleasure comes out of the family, not out of herself, who is glad the child is “like” the head of the household, the father; daughter, who has already begun to internalize the power structure, knowing that she is, as a child, to some degree defenseless and passive; that powerful presence, the father. The touching the little girl does not receive from her father may simply be parental affection—like the speaker in “Tango,” she may be “actively starving” for emotional warmth—but the language focuses simply upon “touch,” the communication of the body, not the spirit. Even here, Glück concentrates on the demands and desires of the body, and of differences in power. Since “she is [only] a child,” she remains passive while the father has the capability to be active. There is the beginning awareness of power as it manifests in familiar and societal roles, and the way roles are tied up with gender definition.

“From the Suburbs” certainly does not indulge in an expansive exploration of its subject, but it gains intensity as the sequence progresses. “Grandmother,” the second section, again examines the role of a female in the family. The poem opens in the grandmother's own words, as memory takes her back to her youth—before children, before grandchildren. The speaker takes up the thread and is able to “watch” the figures of her grandparents; she reserves condemnation enough to claim, “I do not question their happiness.” Yet she sees the passionate lives of her grandparents, in spite of the couple's happiness, as yet another example of sexuality as struggle.

This time the hunger is the man's; he is the instigator, the teacher—the assertive partner, not unlike the father in the preceding section. Yet any feminist criticism of marriage is once again muted: in its focus on miniature detail—light in the man's hair, the way he becomes recognizable only as he draws nearer—the poem avoids reliance on rhetoric or propaganda. Still, the final lines focus on the husband “rush(ing) in / with his young man's hunger” while the speaker pulls back from the scene to comment: “Of course, of course. Except / it might as well have been / his hand over her mouth.” As this section immediately follows “From the Suburbs,” Glück implies that the two situations are analogous, part of the same larger pattern. In both, the action implies a question: who controls a female's body—both when she is a child and when she is a wife?

“Eros,” the third section, takes modern middle-class life in the suburbs into the mythic realm. This section follows essentially the same structure as that in “Grandmother.” In both sections, four lines introduce the poem's subject. Although here the language is more arch and formal, these lines likewise set up a proposition of sorts: that male heterosexuality can be traced to a search for the mother. The lines following explore the plausibility of that proposition: while in “Grandmother” the speaker enters the world her grandmother has spoken of, in “Eros” the speaker explores further the Freudian implications already introduced. The girl child, an important figure in this section, follows the typical movement from love for the mother to love for the father; the way she “wills herself” toward the father, seems in this poem to be yet another instance of the terrible, inexorable drive to be merged. The final two lines correspond to the final three in “Grandmother,” since the swift endings in both sections sum up knowledge wryly and emphatically. One cannot know one's paternal parentage—“the bond”—with the same knowledge one holds for the mother; it is this uncertainty that wills one into an Electra complex, the poem hints.

Out of this “desperate” urge for the father we see the penultimate section emerge.

“THE DEVIATION”

It begins quietly
in certain female children:
the fear of death, taking as its form
dedication to hunger,
because a woman's body
is a grave; it will accept
anything. I remember
lying in bed at night
touching the soft, digressive breasts,
touching, at fifteen,
the interfering flesh
that I would sacrifice
until the limbs were free
of blossom and subterfuge: I felt
what I feel now, aligning these words—
it is the same need to perfect,
of which death is the mere byproduct.

(Descending Figure, 32)

The deviation is anorexia, a dedication to hunger, and it grows out of the familial norm in a male-dominated society. What we have seen in the preceding sections has been disturbing, but not because of unusual violence or deviant behavior: each character has been “normal”; some have specifically known pleasure and happiness. They epitomize the superficially safe, apparently stable life of the suburbs, yet from them comes that haunting fear of non-being, of non-personhood in which the speaker can say a woman's body is a “grave” in its sexual capacity “to accept anything.” Glück links the anorexic's need to control and perfect with that of the writer, so that in this section she declares her aesthetic and the forces that impel her to adopt it.

“Sacred Objects,” the last section of the sequence, combines the mythic and the quotidian more fully than do the preceding four sections. Yet its power of conclusion, of combining and summing up, still is achieved through the spareness of language. The section begins:

Today in the field I saw
the hard, active buds of the dogwood
and wanted, as we say, to capture them,
to make them eternal. That is the premise
of renunciation: the child
having no self to speak of,
comes to life in denial—

(Descending Figure, 33)

The section opens as if it will unfold a narrative event, but by the fourth line we see that the narrative serves as something of a parable, articulating the way an urge toward immutability might find its only expression in “denial” or “renunciation.” Glück's “craving” for the “immutable” is part of the human condition and appears throughout literature of all ages. Yeats treated the subject repeatedly in the poems that are still among his best-remembered: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Lapis Lazuli,” “The Circus Animals' Desertion.” He sees his body as a “dying animal” to which he is chained; we are familiar with his metaphors and those of other great male poets. With “Dedication to Hunger” Glück has created a new metaphor—primarily based on female experience—to speak about the old craving to transcend the mortal and bodily confines. She hints as well that a woman's mortal restrictions are rather different from a man's. Her poems repeatedly emphasize the woman's body as an object, but it is an object that constantly threatens, through its own desires, to destroy its value or utility. Yet even though a political indictment lies deep within “Dedication to Hunger” and her other intimations of anorexia, that indictment and its accompanying anger are muted and not allowed to surface in the texture of her language in each individual section.

Through careful progression of sections, we see again how Glück is able to depend on the silence between statements—the renunciation of explicit narrative or transitional explanation—to imply the connections embodied in the poem. Glück's placement of “Dedication to Hunger” within the collection also helps to enhance the individual themes contained in the sequence. “Porcelain Bowl” precedes the “Hunger” sequence, and this brief poem introduces the notion of a woman's body relegated to the categories of use and ornamentation—societal attitudes that are directly responsible for anorexia.

The book's closing pages are another poem sequence, “Lamentations.” This sequence is also subdivided into titled sections (“The Logos,” “Nocturne,” “The Covenant,” “The Clearing,”), all of which return to the creation mythology of “Descending Figure.” They focus on the loneliness that belongs to humankind, and trace the way God, too, “wanted to be understood”; he combats his loneliness by turning away from humans. First, he “turned to his angels”; the angels watch “how He divided them: / the man, the woman, and the woman's body.” Finally “God arose, His great shadow / darkening the sleeping bodies of His children, / and leapt into heaven.”⁴⁶ The man and woman are left alone on the earth, strange to one another, with a child to care for.

Thus, the book's end is loaded with the mournful loneliness of humans for the comfort of their immortal god; with “their human warmth, / their panic”; with the terrible divisions that set men apart from women and women apart from their own bodies; with the responsibility of a family. All the ingredients which have led to the clearly contemporary situations depicted in the book are manifest in “Lamentations.” The sequence thus implies how time has changed little in the way humans connect with one another.

Descending Figure demonstrates eloquently how order and sequence can articulate a wider, more encompassing treatment of themes than that found in any single poem; indeed, I find that any single poem is slightly diminished in scope when removed from the entirety of the book. But “The Garden” appears to be the only poem sequence that Glück initially perceived as a sequence. Some of the others appear to have been conceived originally as separate pieces—and even published that way—and only later put together into the kind of development that distinguishes the collection.⁴⁷ Thus, from 1975, the year of publication for Marshland, until 1979, the year before publication of Descending Figure, the sequence apparently was not yet a major formal concern in Glück's poetry. Although the form had worked for “The Garden” as early as 1975, it did not seem to hold Glück's interest until shortly before the publication of her third book, nearly five years later. I suspect that the work of careful editing that must have been necessary to see Descending Figure as a whole may also have led to Glück's recognition of the sequence as a perfect form with which to extend her power for lyric concision into somewhat more expansive meditations.

None of the poems in the collection appears incidental, although they vary in quality. Indeed, some that were published in periodicals during these years have been omitted from the collection. One in particular, “In the Empty House,” appeared in the Iowa Review in 1976 along with two other poems chosen for Descending Figure. “In the Empty House” shares much with the style of the poems chosen, but it emphasizes the act of writing distinct from the other hungers Glück chooses to combine in her collection; its surreal focus on the implements of writing seems caricatured. The house itself, with its furnishings, is said at the poem's end to be “counseling stillness,” while, strangely, the speaker has a vision of a pencil appearing in a room, full of dreams and memory that will then dissolve into the act of writing. In spite of the way it voices an urge to silence, stillness, that is vital to Glück's aesthetic, “In the Empty House” is self-indulgent, more heavily romantic in its focus on the “I” without the emphasis on mythic implications we see in Glück's more successful poems. It does not belong in the collection: it is not in balance.

With The Triumph of Achilles (1985), Glück continues to emphasize the long poem, although the title poem itself consists of only twenty lines. Of the twenty-six poems that make up this collection, eight extend into several sections, many of them subtitled. Additionally, many of these long poems are longer than those in Descending Figure: “Marathon,” for example, has nine titled sections, filling eleven pages, and “From the Japanese” likewise has nine sections, though these are not titled, and some are very brief. Yet an important distinction separates this book's approach from that of her previous collection. In a review, Edward Hirsch speaks of

Glück's more open and intimate style and manner. Her most humane book thus far, The Triumph of Achilles is empowered by a complex struggle to live in the world as it is, to accept what the poet has learned to believe is the only world there is, to come to terms with the hard Stevensian proposition that “Death is the mother of beauty.”⁴⁸

Similarly, Don Bogen notes, “The range of the work has expanded. … Language is looser, embracing the casual as well as the concise.”⁴⁹ To return to Wayne Booth's terminology, whereas the implied author of Descending Figure recognized stasis, stillness, and death as important elements of existence, Triumph recognizes other elements as well, including humor. Poems like “The Mountain,” a modern parody of the artist-teacher as Sisyphus, are more drily funny, self-mocking, and free of malice than any of the poems in Glück's three earlier books.

Yet Glück's new humor is never bawdy or slapstick. Glück's spareness and reliance on juxtaposition remain primary elements of her style; once again she has widened her subject matter. Although Glück has often relied on juxtaposition for effect, that juxtaposition has rarely included an almost Laforguian use of differing tones placed beside one another, as in “From the Japanese,” where she combines serious statements like “Why love what you will lose? / There is nothing else to love” with amusing anecdotes about Gwen, a bilingual child of three, and the child's cat, Trixie. Triumph marks a new development in Glück's work for the formal use of tone.

The appearance of a new degree of tonal inclusiveness does not, however, replace Glück's dedication to narrative concision. The inclusiveness grows out of her earlier interests; moreover, this book contains poems that do not diverge from the postconfessional classicism we have seen in her two previous books. The second poem in the collection, a three-part sequence titled “Metamorphosis,” continues Glück's work of imbedding the personal in the mythic: it is primarily an elegy for her father. The title sets the mythic context, with its reference to Ovid, and the elegy proceeds with the slow rhythmic dignity familiar in Glück. Many of the line breaks are dictated by syntax; predicate and complement are often set apart from each other, with the natural pause of a breath in between, while modifying phrases are likewise given lines by themselves. These lines are from the second section.

Once, for the smallest
fraction of an instant, I thought
he was alive in the present again;
then he looked at me
as a blind man stares
straight into the sun, since
whatever it could do to him
is done already.
Then his flushed face
turned away from the contract.

(Triumph of Achilles, 5)

To emphasize the emotional and linguistic control evident in this poem's craft, we might compare it with any of the poems by Sharon Olds concerning her father's illness and death, where the line breaks are as surprising and jolting as the imagery.⁵⁰ Glück's poem does not attempt to shock, but rather to see and to live with the responsibility of that sight. The poem is “about” maturity, gained at one of the defining moments of adulthood, the death of a parent.

Glück's interest in fusing contemporary experience with ancient myth continues throughout Triumph, and as the title might reflect, the mythology is largely from the classical Greek legends, rather than from the Judeo-Christian tradition. However, one poem, “Winter Morning,” begins with a meditation on the death of Christ and moves into an enactment of the birth, fusing old fertility rites' yearning for spring with the promise of the nativity. Another, “Day without Night,” carries a Biblical epigraph: “The angel of god pushed the child's hand / away from the jewels, toward the burning coal.” After retelling how Pharaoh's daughter discovered Moses amid the rushes, the poem moves, in its eighth and final section, to a difficult, nearly existential appraisal of faith (and death):

Here is your path to god,
who has no name, whose hand
is invisible: a trick
of moonlight on the dark water.

(Triumph, 49)

The stoical courage, the determination to endure, that ends this poem is an attitude familiar from earlier personal classicists, especially Bogan and Bishop. Glück wills herself to see the comfortless condition of humanity bereft of naive faith but with a tenacity reminiscent of that in the earlier “Dedication to Hunger,” in which the speaker recalls her adolescent resolution to “free” herself of the flesh's “blossom and subterfuge.”

Yet aside from these poems, the unmistakable atmosphere of the book is Hellenic, and, in its way, again reminiscent of H. D. “Mythic Fragment” is clearly a persona poem, spoken by Daphne, daughter of the river god Peneus. In order to avoid Apollo's pursuit, she begged her father to protect her: his solution reveals that only through renunciation of her female form can she avoid marriage. The appeal of this myth, given Glück's repeated interests, should be obvious. Glück's poem emphasizes Daphne's wistful loneliness and her desire for her father's love, not the passion of Apollo. The speaker is a female victim: she sees the god's praise as what Western culture's idealization of women has always been—a condition in which the woman's self is lost, “captivity.” Yet, terribly, the only refuge offered by her father is both obliteration and a form of captivity, as well. She calls for her father's aid and then: “I was nowhere, / I was in a tree forever.” Only through losing her female identity can she escape being “encompassed” by Apollo.

Glück's poem has a strong feminist message, but, unlike her earliest persona poems, its tone is quiet, making no rhetorical proclamations. Even the bitterness in the direct address—“Reader, / pity Apollo”—is a controlled stab at the canon's sympathy with Apollo's gesture toward tribute, or “praise,” in wearing a laurel wreath in memory of the woman he could not possess. The indictment remains implied, not explicit. In this respect, it is much like some of the early personal classicist persona poems of H. D., not because the mythic characters correspond to and mask particular people or events in Glück's own life, but because the poem's speaker is seen anew in feminist terms, the woman's emotions—not Apollo's—are the heart of the work. We might easily compare “Mythic Fragment” to H. D.'s “Eurydice,” “Circe,” or “Evadne,” for example, or to Bogan's “Cassandra.” This is essentially what Alicia Ostriker calls revisionist mythmaking, as described in chapter 1.

Glück has said, “I am puzzled, not emotionally but logically, by the contemporary determination of women to write as women,” explaining that gender differences will arise without an author's studied attention, so that one need not make a specific task of writing out of one's gender. She further explains, “The dream of art is not to assert what is already known, but to illuminate the hidden, and the path to the hidden world is not inscribed by the will.”⁵¹ Clearly, she does not feel a responsibility as a woman poet to reeducate, through poetic rhetoric, her readers. Her use of myth continues to reveal her preference for subtlety, reticence, and control.

Glück has explained that her interest in myth is not the result of adult study, a kind of academic interest. Instead, the telling of myth was a part of her childhood; her parents told her fairy tales and myths, frequently making their own improvisations. Her father, for example, loved to tell the tale of St. Joan, excluding the final burning which martyred the girl. Thus, Glück says, “Before I was three I was well-grounded in Greek myths.”⁵² While myth was a part of her early development, so too was the revisioning of myth. Her earliest experiences with story-telling and literature included changing the accepted mythology to fit the teller's needs or desires. As we've seen, this is the approach she takes in her poetry, where the personal and the mythic are fused in the most recent manifestation of personal classicism, that of a postconfessional classicism.

The long poem sequence “Marathon” exemplifies just how Glück's fusion of mythic and personal take shape in The Triumph of Achilles. The sequence follows a brief poem, “The Embrace,” which recounts a woman teaching her lover of “the gods” and in return being led by him “back” into “the original need.” “The Embrace,” then, sets a scene for mythology and sexuality to act out their drama, and “Marathon” provides the cycles of action. The sequence is divided into nine titled sections, “Last Letter,” “Song of the River,” “The Encounter,” “Song of Obstacles,” “Night Song,” “The Beginning,” “First Goodbye,” “Song of Invisible Boundaries,” and “Marathon.” Together they trace the progress of a romantic relationship.

Much of the poem is placed in a Mediterranean coastal village. Section six, “The Beginning,” recounts a dream where the speaker is in the market, recalling “Baskets,” from earlier in the book, also clearly set in a Mediterranean village. The title of “Marathon,” then, carries a connotation of place, or destination, as well as that of the arduous race. Within the dream recounted in “The Beginning,” the speaker describes the marketplace full of fruit stands selling a single fruit—blood oranges—each stand exhibiting one of the ripe fruits cut open. The language reveals elements of Glück's vision familiar from Descending Figure: desires are hungers, and all desires long for structure. Says the speaker: “Then what began as love for you / became a hunger for structure.” This passage recalls Glück's earlier insistence that the urge to write poetry was the same as that which leads to anorexia: to give structure, to “perfect” as she said in “The Deviation,” whether through hunger or through “aligning these words” on the page.

Similarly, Glück continues to work with language in context, allowing an image or phrase to reappear throughout the work; the next sequence, “First Goodbye,” addresses the you directly, telling him to leave, to “go back”

to increment and limitation: near the centered rose,
you watch her peel an orange
so the dyed rind falls in petals on her plate. This
is mastery, whose active
mode is dissection …

(Triumph, 31)

As the orange image recurs, bringing the world of dream into the world of the present, Glück employs the same principles that led her to identify a “descending figure” as the appropriate metaphor for her work.

Throughout this book, however, the structuring metaphor is not chosen from music, but from myth, constantly implying that mythology is an actual part of our daily lives. “Marathon” ends like “The Triumph of Achilles,” recognizing the inescapable mutability that defines human existence; however, it is more chilling, abandoning the physical world and seemingly entering a mythical dream world where nothing definite and lasting is possible, not even the abiding love that bound Achilles and Patroclus. The section recounts a dreamlike sequence during which the speaker hears a former lover speaking to her new lover, describing her body and how best to arouse it. The poem, and the sequence, end on a note of frightening uncertainty:

For all I know, this happens
every night: somebody waking me, then
the first teaching the second.
What happens afterward
occurs far from the world, at a depth
where only the dream matters
and the bond with any one soul
is meaningless; you throw it away.

(Triumph, 34)

Glück has said that she has always preferred work that directly addresses the reader, that seems to need the reader.⁵³ Her own work is often difficult in its complexity, its spareness, and its intraconnectedness, yet I find throughout the development of her mature work a careful tone that, while it eschews extreme prosiness or direct confession, does imply a listener. Her best work exhibits courage, fortitude, and control—qualities that are important in an age when confessional “sincerity” is often substituted for craft.

Moreover, her use of the poem sequence demonstrates an important technique for offering a more wide-ranging meditation without losing any tension. Indeed, tension is often gained over the course of a poem sequence. It is interesting to recall what Richard Hugo told young poets in The Triggering Town about the importance of “writing off the subject” with his dichotomy of “triggering subject” and “real subject.”⁵⁴ According to Hugo's model, the triggering or initiating subject is what catches the poet's interest and offers her or him an occasion to discuss emotions or memories or other truths buried somewhere in the poet's psyche. Hugo's discussion centers on ways of getting off the triggering subject and onto the real subject with skill and grace, to allow for greater possibility within the poem. In Glück's work it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between triggering and real subjects: the longer forms seem, for Glück, to be ways of distilling a returning concern—the real subject—into more than one section, each with its own contextual subject. What triggers, what initiates? At times it seems the voice itself is the starting point, as experiments in syntax “open up kinds of subject matter.” In Glück's poetry the compression results repeatedly in a tension between expression and silence, and the long poem sequences present a form in which this tension can work: a kind of long-distance reticence.

In Ararat (1990), Glück continues to use the poem sequence, but in a hardly recognizable fashion. The book contains thirty-two titled poems, only one of which is broken into numbered sections. Yet Glück has said that she perceives the book as being essentially one long poem, one entire work, much the same way I have argued Descending Figure should be read. At least one reviewer saw the book in this manner, suggesting that the book “works almost as a single poem.”⁵⁵ The most remarkable change in Ararat, however, is that Glück is returning to a more fully personal poetry. She has not abandoned her interest in classical, biblical, or mythic allusion, as the title alone makes clear. Glück makes the present darkly numinous with the past: the personal past and the mythic past.

The opening poem is titled “Parodos” (italics Glück's); Glück becomes a Greek chorus of sorts, witnessing life, death, and its resultant effects on individual and collective lives. But throughout the collection, the sense of contemporary life actually participating in the mythic is softened; instead, the book focuses on the speaker's act of autobiographic witnessing—witnessing the death of her father and the way the family deals with death, and, further, the way the family's shared past has prepared it for this event. The anonymous jacket blurb describes the poetry this way: “It is the singular, pervasive myth of family that she examines with a scientist's precision” and “she now breaks free of it [her previous style], in a voice no longer oracular but wry, idiomatic, undeceived, unrelenting.”

Another reviewer saw the book as introducing something that “seems new in Glück's work—a thoroughly human scale, without ornament.”⁵⁶ While I believe The Triumph of Achilles began Glück's process of shifting emphasis back to the human level from the mythic or archetypal emphasized throughout The House on Marshland and Descending Figure, Ararat does seem to move beyond the sense of the immortal that asserted itself as a kind of desperate need in some of the earlier work. For example, the book's penultimate poem, titled “Celestial Music,” opens with these lines, sounding absolutely spoken, and renouncing the need for the gods that pervades Descending Figure:

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally
          talks to god.
she thinks someone listens in heaven.

(Ararat, 66)

Philosophical and searching in their meditations, the poems are generous with the way they draw upon biography, the way they openly sift through the speaker's life. With Ararat, I find Glück moving beyond willed stoicism and its attendant shielding of the self into a new form of more personal poetry. For this book at least, she seems to have left much of personal classicism behind. She has not, however, returned to the abrupt rhythms and syntax that characterized her earlier work. The greater generosity and sharing of autobiography of Ararat is not a return to her earlier confessional mode. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, since Glück has made clear that she wants to move in a new direction with each book, never simply repeating her achieved strengths. Having set the standard for contemporary personal classicism, she moves into different territory once again. In her own words, “Each book I've written has culminated in a conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off.”⁵⁷

Notes

1. Carol Rumens, “Introduction,” Making for the Open, XVI; Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter, 139.

2. “Introduction,” XV.

3. Alan Williamson, Introspection and Contemporary Poetry, 149.

4. Snodgrass, Selected Poems, 67; Plath, “Nick and the Candlestick,” Collected Poems, 242.

5. Introspection. 151; Glück, “Descending Figure: An Interview,” 118.

6. “Necessity and Freedom: The Poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton,” 18; “Sylvia Plath,” in The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman, 67.

7. The Confessional Poets, 16.

8. Introspection, 154.

9. “Women in Transition: The Poetry of Anne Sexton and Louise Glück,” 136.

10. Confessional Poets, 1.

11. Calvin Bedient, “Birth, Not Death, Is the Hard Loss,” 168; Helen Vendler, review, New York Times Book Review, 37; Vendler, “The Poetry of Louise Glück,” 34.

12. “Descending Figure: An Interview,” 118.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid. See Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry, chapter 1.

15. Robert Bly, “What the Image Can Do,” in Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall, 42; Williamson implies this possibility, too, 151.

16. “Louise Glück's The House On Marshland,” 5.

17. “An Interview,” 123.

18. Next to Last Things, 89; Wooten, “Louise Glück,” 5.

19. See, for example, Chapters in a Mythology.

20. The Collected Poems, 204.

21. Marshland, 11.

22. “Gretel in Darkness,” New American Review, 7 (1969): 171.

23. “Jukebox,” Antaeus 17 (Spring 1975): 67.

24. The Rhetoric of Fiction, 75.

25. Confessional Poets, 1.

26. Introspection, 150.

27. “Some Recent American Poetry: Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies,” 41.

28. Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg discusses “The Aesthetics of Anorexia” in Emily Dickinson: When a Writer Is a Daughter (esp. pp. 143–46), and certainly Dickinson's use of food—whether it is being withheld or rejected—reveals a similar attitude about the female body's self-determination. But Glück's work explores further the literal and figurative levels of metaphor, bringing to bear her comparison of anorexia—not merely hunger—to poetry, another “language of the body.” Dickinson, for all her shared interests in theme, remains a much more distant forbear; Steven Yenser, “Recent Poetry: Five Poets,” 99.

29. Part of Nature, Part of Us, 311.

30. Fifty Contemporary Poets, ed. Alberta Turner, 113–14.

31. “The Mind Afoot,” 157–58.

32. “An Interview,” 119.

33. “After the Fall,” 466.

34. “Missed Books: Descending Figure,” 12.

35. Letter, American Book Review, 6,1 (1983): 4.

36. “An Interview,” 117–18.

37. “Education of the Poet,” 2.

38. “An Interview,” 117.

39. “Education,” 2.

40. “Recent Poetry,” 99.

41. “Recent Poetry,” 99.

42. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age, 142.

43. Ibid., 100, 149.

44. New York Review of Books, 28 (July 16, 1981): 26

45. “Education,” 4.

46. Glück does not capitalize the deity in the first section, “The Logos,” but she does in all the following sections, “Nocturne,” “The Covenant,” and “The Clearing.”

47. From the title sequence, “For My Sister” was published in American Poetry Review in 1975; “The Sick Child” in The New Yorker in 1978; and a poem titled “Descending Figure” in Antaeus in 1976 which is precisely the same text as that which appears in the book as the first section titled “The Wanderer.” “Grandmother,” from “Dedication to Hunger” appeared in Salmagundi in the fall of 1979, several months before the entire sequence appeared in Antaeus. “The Logos” and “The Clearing” from “Lamentations” appeared in Antaeus in the winter of 1978 as distinct poems, months before the entire sequence would appear along with several other poems in the New Republic

48. “The Watcher,” 33.

49. “The Fundamental Skeptic,” 53.

50. I am indebted to Roger Mitchell's discussion of Sharon Olds's line breaks in “Thoughts on the Line,” Ohio Review 38 (1987). See especially pp. 75–77.

51. “Education,” 3.

52. Ibíd.

53. Ibid., 4.

54. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing.

55. Introductory remarks, poetry reading at Ohio University's Spring Literary Festival, Athens, Ohio, May 4, 1989; Stephen Dobyns, “Will You Listen for a Minute?” 5.

56. Marianne Boruch, “Comment: The Feel of a Century,” 17.

57. “Education,” 6.

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