Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets

Myth, Persona, and the Personal

46 Myth, Persona, and the Personal Shara McCallum In eighth grade, my English class studied Greek mythology. Trying to interest a roomful of disaffected adolescents, our teacher staged a Jeopardy! game around the subject. I’m not someone who easily recalls facts under pressure, so I was surprised to find myself of value to the team. The Greek gods and goddesses we’d been learning about, with their virtues and flaws, were vivid in my teenage imagination, reminiscent of most of the adults I knew. It came as little surprise to me that Aphrodite was beautiful but also filled with jealousy and rage; that Demeter, devastated by the loss of her child and blinded by grief, ruined everything in her path; or that head god Zeus presided over the universe while debasing himself, assuming animal form to have sex with the human women he desired. As a college junior years later, I took my first creative writing workshop and was introduced to the world of contemporary poetry. Before that class, I’d read Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” in a modernism course; in another, I’d studied Milton’s Paradise Lost. Throughout my education, I had been schooled in the belief that “great literature” was built on the foundation of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian myths, yet until I took a poetry workshop, it didn’t dawn on me that living poets might still have something to say about these stories. Perhaps more than any other contemporary poet, Louise Glück has spent a career rewriting Greek myths. In her poems, these stories have provided a way into, through, and out of the themes that are her core concerns as an artist: mother-daughter and other familial relationships; thwarted or destructive forms of romantic love; marriage and divorce; and the individual’s struggle with an indifferent or unreachable God. Over the course of her career, she has sustained a lyric-dramatic voice that both contains and exposes her obsessions, ones—given the recurrence of subject matter and point of view—that appear to stem from her own experience. )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 myth, persona, and the personal 47 What myth has afforded Glück is access to archetypes, providing a broader context for the seemingly personal utterances of many of her poems. Assuming personae, as Glück has often done in adopting the voices of various mythic characters, has been another means for her to expand and deepen the subjectivity of her work. The speaker of a poem is always a persona since the voice on the page is never identical to the writer’s voice off the page, even when the material is strictly autobiographical, but I distinguish between the kind of first-person perspective wedded to the lyric poem and the kind we encounter in what has come to be called the “persona poem.” The latter comes out of the tradition of the dramatic monologue. In the case of the persona poem, the speaker is not overtly an aspect of the poet but rather serves as a mask for the poet. Louise Glück’s poem “Pomegranate” is an example of how the poet’s retelling of myth and use of persona come together. Delivered from the point of view of Persephone, daughter of the goddess Demeter, the poem recounts this famous mother-daughter saga, but its success resides in its many departures from the story’s usual unfolding. Contrary to Hades’ characterization in traditional versions, Glück’s Hades is a sympathetic figure, a lover who helps Persephone to see her mother’s “true” nature. Through his encouragement, the poem implies that Persephone will free herself from the clutches of an all-consuming mother (perhaps only to fall into his). Unlike Demeter’s typical casting as Mother Earth, Glück presents her as self-serving, one who “parades” her grief “over our heads” and demands that she remain the center of attention. “Consider she is in her element,” Hades says, with more than a trace of sarcasm, “the trees turning to her, whole / villages going under.” “Pomegranate” suggests that if you are going to rewrite a myth, you need to do something different, in part to justify repeating a tale that has been rehashed countless times. Beyond Glück’s novel take on Persephone’s story, “Pomegranate” is a rich poem to consider in terms of its use of persona. Speaking as Persephone in the poem, Glück uses persona as a de...