![gretel in darkness gretel in darkness](https://0901.static.prezi.com/preview/v2/q4lpdwqrvdhkoxjne3ighmfwsl6jc3sachvcdoaizecfr3dnitcq_3_0.png)
Glück has always (and self-consciously) favored abstraction over particularity - from the beginning, she’s written lines that are almost completely devoid of the kind of chatty reportage and pop cultural name-dropping that have been common in American poetry since the death of Frank O’Hara. That’s probably inevitable, given her sensibility. Myths, legends and fairy tales are for Glück what heirloom tomatoes are for Alice Waters.
![gretel in darkness gretel in darkness](https://poemanalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/gretel-in-the-darkness-visual-represntation-min.jpg)
This is not even to count her 1992 book “The Wild Iris,” which is basically an allegorical system based on garden plants. The relationship between poetry and mythology is central to Louise Glück’s new POEMS 1962-2012 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Ecco/HarperCollins, $40), if only because no poet of Glück’s generation has relied more overtly on what Philip Larkin once called “the common myth kitty.” A representative list of titles: “Gemini,” “Aphrodite,” “The Triumph of Achilles,” “Legend,” “A Fantasy,” “A Fable,” “Amazons,” “Penelope’s Song,” “Telemachus’ Dilemma,” “Circe’s Torment,” “Eurydice,” “Persephone the Wanderer,” “Persephone the Wanderer” (again). with a monotonous chant of ‘Kill! kill! kill!’ and ‘Blood! blood! blood!’ ” Which might sound more like a strip club picnic gone badly awry, but you get the idea. Here is Robert Graves in 1948: “No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires. Then there are poets who equate the idea of myth with the supposedly irrational essence of poetry itself. Other times poetry applies a mythological glamour to stories and characters from history, legend or even other myths (the hero of the “Aeneid” is a minor character from the “Iliad”). Sometimes poets are in the business of collecting and tweaking existing myths, as with Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and the Poetic Edda. Poetry has always been the handmaiden of mythology, and vice versa.