Louise Glück and the Sex Lives of Poets

Referring to white flowers “lighting the yard,” the speaker in Louise Glück’s “Mock Orange” declares “I hate them,” and then, more shockingly, elaborates:

Louise Glück
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Daniel Ebersole

I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—

When I first read those lines, I was stunned by what I saw as Glück’s audacious candor in exposing what I took to be a wildly unattractive truth about herself.

To reveal in public that you detest sex is a big risk for many women—perhaps less so for men, but still. You risk uglifying yourself in the eyes of potential mates and friends and even yourself in the mirror.

The peril—from a career standpoint—might be multiplied for women poets for whom interest in their verse is increased to the extent that they appear sexy. Indeed, among the few taboos regarding sex these days, the least honored in the breach might be declaring a dislike for it.

Of course, the boldness and frankness of the poem’s assertion is also a primary source of its power. “Mock Orange” seems to be speaking from deep within an individual psyche, expressing a feeling we all might have in a given moment but one that we’d rather hide.

The poem has been read as a bold feminist affirmation and as a sharp critique of Romanticism. (After all, it dismisses the moon, perhaps the most Romantic of poetic symbols, in its very first line.) But is “Louise Glück” really the speaker in the poem?

In this poet’s case, the temptation to read her poems biographically is especially large because her life has become newsworthy. Last year, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and her acceptance speech has been the subject of controversy.

More broadly, we live in an age when lyric poems are routinely—and fallaciously—regarded as biographically factual statements for which the poet can be held personally responsible for violating cultural norms.

True, although the poem appeared in the mid-1980s, the possible self-cancellation by the speaker in “Mock Orange” may serve as a pre-emptive defense against the potential wounds of public cancellation. (“I’m nobody,” Emily Dickinson, one of Glück’s favorite poets, writes. “Who are you?”)

But let me caution you, once and for all, to resist reading lyric poetry as a lesser offshoot of the currently dominant genre of memoir. The tendency to do so is human, of course, and it may add to the interest, the frisson, of reading the poem. As an inveterate gossip myself, I get where such readers are coming from.

But think of what you’re missing if you focus exclusively on “Mock Orange” as a mere datum of the sex life of the poet Louise Glück. I would argue that you are missing out on experiencing the full force of the poem itself. Biography is interesting, but the lives of most poets are only as interesting to posterity as the poems the poet has written over the course of her lifetime. (Pace Samuel Johnson, whose Lives of the English Poets is a work of art in itself.)

Assuming that we don’t know the poet personally, it’s the writing of poems that makes the person’s life most interesting to us. Once you get beyond the poetry, what do you have? Yes, you have Adrienne Rich’s and Amiri Baraka’s activism, Sylvia Plath’s suicide, and Ezra Pound’s Fascism.

Ultimately, though, the most significant things you can know about these figures are their poems. They are not Lincoln, Mussolini, Rosa Parks, or Catherine the Great. Looking overly much at their biographies can have the effect of distancing you further and further from the sound and sense of the experience, of, say, imagining that tantalizing smell of mock orange—of grasping how, exquisitely sweet though it may be, it stands for everything that is phony or second-hand in the world.

If you had stopped with the shock that you had fallen privy to an intimate personal revelation—as I did, momentarily—and not read more deeply into the poem, you might not have allowed yourself to feel that the “I” who in the poem is hungering for candor, authenticity, and truth in the world might very well be you.