About Suffering is the fourth book in Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Poetry and Poetics, a series of expansive monographs from a variety of scholarly viewpoints. Author Christos Hadjiyiannis’s text looks to poet Louise Glück to consider the virtue of suffering as a tenet for the writing of poetry. Glück’s poetry has often come to be associated with suffering, as it is such a recurrent theme in her numerous collections. However, Hadjiyiannis successfully argues that this correlation, while correct, is extensively simplified andmisunderstood: “By giving equal voice to flowers and plants, to the divine, and to humans, Glück added her own voice to those before her who found suffering’s position to be lonely and unnoticed and who, at the same time, sought to share it”.
Glück died in 2023, only three years after winning the Nobel Prize in literature. Despitethe wide gap of time since the publication of her opus The Wild Iris (1992), there has been surprisingly little critical scholarship on Glück’s work. Only one critical text predates About Suffering, which was Juliet Feit Diehl’s On Louise Glück: Change What You See from the University of Michigan Press in 2005. This was an anthology which brought together essays by writers such as Stephanie Burt and Frank Bidart. In some sense, more time may be needed to more accurately gauge the overall lasting impact of her works, but the continued engagement certainly speaks to her legacy.
While there are many sinews in the genealogy of suffering the book constellates, Hadjiyiannis most immediately puts Glück into conversation with Rainer Marie Rilke, whose poetry Glück held conflicting views on, and which she saw as having a damaging influence. In Glück’s 1998 essay “American Narcissism,” she casts Rilke’s poetry as narcissistic: “It wasn’t just that Rilke’s attitude towards suffering was objectionable; it was also that his influence on poetry was lamentable. He was to blame for the facile, voyeuristic, and self-involved poetry of some of her contemporaries”. Hadjiyiannis builds a contrast between what Glück alchemizes from Rilke with inspiration she draws from T.S. Eliot’s depersonalized theory of poetry from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). Glück developed an impersonal poetics which she brings to her poetry, determinedly nonconfessional and engaged with Eliot’s aim of emotion having life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.
Hadjiyiannis shows that Glück’s relationship with Rilke is more multifaceted, that she rails against him in her essay, but (consciously or unconsciously) draws from him too. He muses on the notion that it may well be an instance of the all-too-familiar anxiety of influence: “More likely, it was that Glück recognised that Rilke’s poetry was appealing but perilous, slowly slipping into a narcissism she didn’t want for her own”.
The book suffers from its brevity—each chapter is quite short, sixteen in total, and at only seventy pages, at times, this can be frustrating. Such is the case when Eliot’s influence is brought up but then is not given enough space enough to fully arrive to the conversation on narcissism, while the argument about Rilke also needs more space to develop as satisfyingly as the other poetic inquiries in the text. This is perhaps a concession of the monograph as a form, more than the ambition of its author, and the analysis may have benefitted from additional space to gestate.
Hadjiyiannis is at his best when close reading The Wild Iris, with which he skillfully employs philosophical invocations into the garden where the human speaker confronts divinity and suffering. Here, in the heart of the book, the author equates The Wild Iris to Rilke’s The Book of Hours (1905), a compelling comparison, and the close reading that transpires is often splendid: “For all its searching, all its tapping into religious language and myth, all its irreverent rewriting of Biblical myth, The Wild Iris cannot settle on one answer regarding suffering’s existence, choosing instead ambiguity, self-questioning (on both the part of the human speaker and the divine), melancholy, discomfort, and multiple perspectives that prioritise debate over consensus.”. As the author continues, “For the iris, suffering just happens. There’s no divine intervention and no apocalyptic triumph; however miraculous its reemergence is.”. The success of the book comes in knowing when to acknowledge what suffering cannot be known, and when and what kind of suffering is encapsulated. Hadjiyiannis describes her poems as “less Blake’s lily of the valley than Kierkegaard’s lily of the field which ‘keeps silent and waits,’”. In Glück’s poetry, the imagery mustn’t be pornographic – it must be virtuous.
The book also contains four full-color paintings from 15th and 16th century painters: Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Fra Angelico, Matthias Grünewald, and an anonymous miniature of Saint Margaret of Antioch. The paintings are all taken into the larger conversation, imbricating art into the dialogue of religion and suffering. In particular, Hadjiyiannis makes a compelling comparison between the titular iris in Glück to Saint Margaret: “…the iris resembles Margaret of Antioch (known as Marina in the East), the apocryphal virgin martyr who is swallowed by Satan and who through patience, strength, and charisma manages to break out.”.
Despite some shortcomings, About Suffering is both timely and valuable in its precise readings of Glück’s poems and meaningfully brings the poetry into a dialogue of literary analysis with the diligent solemnity her work has long deserved.
