Achilles' cliched rage

"But you are intractable, Achilles!
Pray god such anger never seizes me, such rage you nurse.
Cursed in your own courage! What good will a man, even one in the next generation get from you, unless you defend the Argives from disaster? You heart of iron!"

As the title indicates, Achilles' rage is one of the more obvious themes of the Iliad-- partly because of the way in which it informs the plot, and partly, because like the rest of the epic, it is grand in its proportions. If it weren't the Iliad we were talking about, I would call it supersize. Like Odysseus' twists and turns, Achilles' rage is what the muse is asked to sing about at the beginning. But this particular utterance regarding Achilles' rage comes from Patroclus, the man who bows before this unending anger, conquering it only by his own death. So there are a couple of things to think about when we look his now somewhat frustrated entreaty to his friend-- the "intractability" of anger and rage, the quality of the courage that Patroclus sees as a curse, and the general lack of goodness, I am inclined to use the word productivity here, that invades the Iliad as a result.
Untractable anger, (and I speak from experience) is a pretty awful thing. But Achilles' nurses this anger, tends to it, allows it to grow rather than allowing for its eventual demise. I am not sure why a Shakespearan character would enter into this dicussion also, but I think of Lear when I think of Achilles. "Come not between the dragon and his wrath," Lear tells Kent when he tries to intervene for Cordelia. In other words, anger, rage, wrath, are precious things that require protection from virtuous intervention.
This anger, however, is horribly picturesque (and I use the word in a somewhat non-Burkian way here). The basic thing about the word picturesque as I use it is that it suggests something can be expressed in a picture, or more generally, in an art form. I understand that there may be other words that might fit the bill, but somehow they're falling short. This idea is tightly contained in Patroclus's vehement hope that "such anger never seizes me," that he, like Achilles, is not transformed by his own paint. In King Lear, however, this idea of one's own anger seen in the form of another is better illustrated when Lear and the Fool walk in a stormy heath:
"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head!"
Indeed, rage is now extant, but Lear understands it completely. What was previously a part of him now speaks to him from beyond himself. The conversation is between old acquintances.
I want to come back to the last thing I wanted to talk about, and it may not be the last, but here goes: the unproductivity of anger. Really, the question here is whether anger drives the aesthetic but subdues and possibly suffocates real human productivity. Patroclus's death is very beautiful in the epic, as are the events and poetry that it spurs-- yet, we ask, is it really worth it? Is our intractability, our inability to see beyond ourselves, our beliefs, our Chryses, our egos, our anger really worth what we lose-- and in tragic cases like this one, is it really worth what is sometimes irretrievable? So is anger just an artistic expression on our parts-- at least, this intractable, unswaying kind? Do we envision ourselves as grander, greater, more beautiful than we really are when we are enflamed and unrelenting? Are we producing a kind of living art even as we let something else die?