The Triumph of Achilles by Louise Glück

First published: 1985

Type of work: Poetry

Form and Content

The poems in The Triumph of Achilles explore sexuality and power, the relation of Eros and Art, the conditions of endurance, and the differences between the aesthetics of men and women. Louise Glück employs a stark, declarative poetry that often grounds its arguments in classical Greek mythology or biblical allusions. Throughout these poems, Glück anatomizes desire and reveals the deep structures that still define the female body.

The twenty-six poems in The Triumph of Achilles are arranged in three parts. Of these poems, eight are long poems divided into sections, some of which are titled. Most illustrative of her long poems is “Marathon.” Placed at the heart of this collection, “Marathon” consists of nine titled sections that trace, through juxtaposition rather than any sequential ordering, the course of a romantic relationship. This emphasis on the long poem, like that on fusing myth with contemporary life, first appears in Glück’s previous collection, Descending Figure (1980). Through her use of the long poem, Glück not only recasts the idea of lyric but also redefines the nature of confessional poetry.

Whereas “Marathon” draws together many of Glück’s thematic and stylistic concerns, the collection’s opening poem, “Mock Orange,” establishes the stringent tone that runs throughout the collection. In this poem, Glück rejects the romantic, sensual qualities of the fragrance of mock orange; in its cloying scent, it is as paralyzing as a man’s body, “the man’s mouth/ sealing my mouth.” The oppressive division between the genders is explicit. The aesthetic choices allowed women are controlled—or usurped—by the male: He seals—either approving or silencing—the poet’s voice.

“Mock Orange” is typical of Glück’s poetry in that it relies on few particularizing details. There is a refusal of any rapture with language, the world, or the body. Indeed, each of these elements has been distilled into an abstraction. Ironically, only the poet’s voice conveys a sense of its own history and narrative—that it is a particular voice, one that has been, however, forced into desolation and obsession.

Glück creates drama through the urgency of an implicit and revelatory dialogue with the reader. “Mock Orange” conveys this in the aside that completes the first line: “It is not the moon, I tell you.” The asides, however, function as rhetorical questions; at the conclusion of the poem, for example, the poet asks, “How can I rest?” The response is yet another question: “How can I be content/ when there is still/ that odor in the world?” The collection responds to these questions of the dominion of the body and its inescapable desires.

The arrangement of the poems in The Triumph of Achilles emphasizes the juxtaposition between the varied tones of the poems. For example, “Mock Orange” is followed by “Metamorphosis,” which is a meditation on Glück’s father’s death and which insists on survival and life. “Metamorphosis” expands on the confessionalism implicit in the asides in “Mock Orange.” Signaled by the allusion to the Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “Metamorphosis” turns the anger and desolation of “Mock Orange” into self-affirmation. In the penultimate sentence of “For My Father,” the third and final section of “Metamorphosis,” Glück states, “I feel/ no coldness that can’t be explained.” Against this assumption of complete knowledge—an assertion of power and control—Glück concludes, “Against your cheek, my hand is warm/ and full of tenderness.”

The first part of the collection concludes with “Liberation,” which reverses the conditions of power that were established in “Mock Orange.” The poet realizes that power—that which can kill—negates the possibility of reflection and questioning. “Only victims have a destiny,” states Glück, whereas it is the hunter who “is paralyzed.” This reversal of the conditions of domination is further explored in the second part of the collection, especially in “Marathon,” the concluding section of the poem of the same title. Here, the patriarchal power of objectification and control, particularly of sexuality, is assumed by the woman poet, even while her position is that of the victim. In the third part of the collection, Glück further explores this reversal of power as well as the duplicity of Eros in such poems as “The Reproach,” “Elms,” and “Horse.” With Eros comes power and inescapable desire that paradoxically overwhelms life, as Glück states in “Horse,” the concluding poem of the collection: “Look at me. You think I don’t understand?/ What is the animal/ if not the passage out of this life?”

Context

Glück’s poetry marks a turn away from strict confessionalism. Her reliance on a classicist poetics—spare, distanced, allusive—suppresses any outright identification with aesthetics of a woman-centered poetry that emphasizes a direct experiential poetry that bears witness. The recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award, The Triumph of Achilles raises the issue of complicity in one’s own oppression. Although Glück’s tone is critical of the myths she invokes, those myths are presented as inescapable dramas.

In these poems, passion leads to oblivion rather than transcendence, art risks being overcome by Eros, the body too easily overwhelms knowing, and sexual consummation erases freedom. If there is to be some solace, then it is that poems are written in the face of such conditions, that against this structured violence one has the choice to write or make art. Nevertheless, the implicit distrust of the body is a disturbing element of Glück’s poetry. The extreme passivity exposed in these poems— exemplified in the detached narrative of the “I” or the controlling elements of myth—is clearly what Glück seeks to criticize, yet such passivity seems also to come to define her poetics.

Bibliography

Dodd, Elizabeth. The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H. D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Contains a most useful and extended discussion of Glück’s poetry, with particular emphasis on Glück’s postconfessional classicism.

Keller, Lynn. “ ‘Free/ of Blossom and Subterfuge’: Louise Glück and the Language of Renunciation.” In World, Self, Poem: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from the “Jubilation of Poets,” edited by Leonard M. Trawick. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990. An overview of Glück’s poetry arguing that it “raises crucial, disturbing issues about women’s complicity in their own oppression.”

McMahon, Lynne. “The Sexual Swamp: Female Erotics and the Masculine Art.” Southern Review 28, no. 2 (Spring, 1992): 333-352. Concentrates on the long poem “Marathon,” and reads Glück’s poetry in relation to the work of the poets Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop.

Raffel, Burton. “The Poetry of Louise Glück.” The Literary Review 31, no. 3 (Spring, 1988): 261-273. This overview of Glück’s work is largely critical of The Triumph of Achilles, seeing the collection as overdramatized, artificial, and often trite.

Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. A brief chapter on Glück emphasizes the demands of writing poems employing myth.