SOURCE: Perryman, John. “Washing Homer's Feat: Louise Glück, Modernism, and the Classics.” South Carolina Review 33, no. 1 (fall 2000): 176–84.

In the following essay, Perryman discusses Glück's rewriting of classic tales, particularly in Meadowlands, and how she has appropriated poetic structures used by modernists such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück continues to distinguish her work from that of her peers, most recently through the instructive way with which she makes use of the past. In Meadowlands (1996), her latest collection of poetry, she incorporates the classics without condescending to them or treating them with mere irony, thereby demonstrating how one can gracefully accept some parts of the past while refusing others. In fact “nostos”—usually translated from the Greek as “return”—not only serves as the provocative title of a poem from Meadowlands but also provides a principle of organization for that...