SOURCE: "The Poetry of Louise Glück," in The Literary Review, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Vol. 31, No. 3, Spring, 1988, pp. 261-73.

Raffel is an American poet, educator, critic, and translator. In this essay, he critiques Glück's poetry up to and including The Triumph of Achilles, which Raffel judges as not fulfilling the promise of the earlier work, and which he assesses as sometimes disconcertingly bad.

Born in 1943, Louise Glück has published four volumes of poetry: Firstborn (1968), The House on Marshland (1975), Descending Figure (1980), and The Triumph of Achilles (1985). She has won prizes and awards; she is reasonably well-known. But the kind of acclaim I believe she deserves has not come to her. She is not yet quite the poet she is capable of being. In particular, her last book represents a severe falling off (though the Poetry Society of America gave it the 1985 Melville Cane Award and The National...