Cassandra at the Evening Window: Louise Glück’s Dark Visions

There are two kinds of vision: the seeing of things, which belongs to the science of optics, versus the seeing beyond things, which results from deprivation.

—“Bats,” A Village Life

If one believes in ghosts—and anyone familiar with Louise Glück’s haunted and haunting poems can attest to the psychic pressures exerted on the living by the dead—then the shade most likely here with us this evening is the poet Allen Tate’s. Indeed his spirit didn’t have far to travel; his grave may be found just up the road—a small plot with modest headstones, where the poet lies buried beside his son Michael, dead in infancy. Tate would certainly have wanted to be here this evening—not only, as a former editor of the Sewanee Review, to toast the recipient of this year’s Aiken Taylor Award, but also because of what I suspect would be his keen interest in, and strong sympathy for, the work of Louise Glück, whose poems share a number of salient qualities with his own.

An unlikely pairing, you will say? Perhaps. The high modernist, New Critical, symbolist-inflected idiom that Tate’s poems and essays enunciated half a century ago seems remote to us now. Between Tate’s poems, written mostly in the early and mid-twentieth century, and Glück’s newest volumes, appearing now in the early twenty-first, whole constellations of poetic innovation and style have moved through the literary skies—from confessionalism to postconfessionalism, and from high modernism to postmodernism, to say nothing of Beat, Black Mountain, New York School, Deep Image, and Flarf, just to name a few. Yet, despite the distance in time and poetic practice (Tate’s free verse, for example, was iambic and modernist, whereas Glück’s sounds more breath-inflected and contemporary), some common threads may be traced. I’m speaking not of influence but of something closer to affinity or correspondence between these two, in other ways, dissimilar poets—mainly an ear for the music of T. S. Eliot, a visionary connection to the figures and themes of myth and classical literature, and a genius for linguistic and emotional violence.

That Eliot should provide a tonic chord is not surprising. In fact it would be hard to think of a modern poet whom Eliot has not touched, either through sympathy or reaction. Still Tate’s and Glück’s very different connections to Eliot are telling. In Tate’s day, of course, Eliot was the very groundwater of modern poetry. As Cynthia Ozick wrote in a retrospective essay in the New Yorker in 1989, for her generation of undergraduates in the 1940s and 50s Eliot was “a god.” “In a literary generation that resembled eternity,” she continues, Eliot constituted, “pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary, fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon.” For Tate the aesthetic debt to Eliot’s work was patent and historical. Tate, like Eliot, had read the French Symbolists and, when later he encountered Eliot’s poems, he understood from them a way in which the “new” could be carried forward, and he eagerly embraced it: “What I owe to T. S. Eliot is pervasive,” Tate owned later: “The two first lines of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ were the first gun of the twentieth-century revolution: the young Tom Eliot pulled the lanyard and quietly went back to his desk in a London bank. But it was a shot heard round the world.”

That shot is, in many ways, still echoing today. When Louise Glück heard it in the 1990s, she wrote an explication and ultimately a defense of Eliot’s contribution, in an age that had seen his reputation wane. By the 1980s Eliot’s star had fallen precipitously. Like that other colossus bestriding the narrow world, Eliot was brought down by the high-minded and the envious. As Ozick puts it in her essay “T. S. Eliot at 101,” it had become embarrassing to “look back at that nearly universal obeisance...