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Louise Glück

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Louise Elisabeth Glück (April 22, 1943 - October 23, 2023) was an American poet who served as Poet Laureate, and won the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes.

Louise Glück. Courtesy the Library of Congress.

Louise Glück. Courtesy the Library of Congress.

Louise Glück
Born Louise Elisabeth Glück
April 22 1943(1943-Template:MONTHNUMBER-22)
New York City, New York, United States
Died October, 13, 1923 (aged 80)
Occupation poet
Nationality United States American
Alma mater Columbia University
Notable award(s) Pulitzer Prize (1993), Bollingen Prize (2001), U.S. Poet Laureate (2003–2004)

Life[]

Youth and education[]

Glück was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. Her father, an immigrant from Hungary, helped invent and market the X-Acto Knife.[1]

Glück graduated in 1961 from George W. Hewlett High School, in Hewlett, New York.

She went on to attend Sarah Lawrence College and later transferred to Columbia University.

Career[]

Glück authored 12 books of poetry, including: A Village Life (2009); Averno (2006) which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award; Ararat (1990), which received the Library of Congress's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award. The First Four Books collects her early poetry.

Glück also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Non-fiction. Sarabande Books published in chapbook form a new, 6-part poem, October, in 2004.

She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1999 was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2003 she was named as judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and served in that position through 2010.

She lived in Cambridge, and was previously a Senior Lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She taught at Yale University, as the Rosencranz Writer in Residence, and in the Creative Writing Program of Boston University. She has also been a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa and hastaught at Goddard College in Vermont.[2]

Glück died from cancer at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 13, 2023, at age 80.[3]

Writing[]

Louise_Glück,_Preview,_11_May_2016

Louise Glück, Preview, 11 May 2016

Glück is best known for lyric poems of linguistic precision and dark tone. The poet Craig Morgan Teicher has described her as a writer for whom "words are always scarce, hard won, and not to be wasted".[4] The scholar Laura Quinney has argued that her careful use of words put Glück into "the line of American poets who value fierce lyric compression", from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop.[5] Glück's poems shifted in form throughout her career, beginning with short, terse lyrics composed of compact lines and expanding into connected book-length sequences.[6] Her work is not known for poetic techniques such as rhyme or alliteration. Rather, the poet Robert Hahn has called her style "radically inconspicuous" or "virtually an absence of style", relying on a voice that blends "portentous intonations" with a conversational approach.[7]

Among scholars and reviewers, there has been discussion as to whether Glück is a confessional poet, owing to the prevalence of the first-person mode in her poems and their intimate subject matter, often inspired by events in Glück's personal life. The scholar Robert Baker has argued that Glück "is surely a confessional poet in some basic sense",[8] while the critic Michael Robbins has argued that Glück's poetry, unlike that of confessional poets Sylvia Plath or John Berryman, "depends upon the fiction of privacy".[9] In other words, she cannot be a confessional poet, Robbins argues, if she does not address an audience. Going further, Quinney argues that, to Glück, the confessional poem is "odious".[5] Others have noted that Glück's poems can be viewed as autobiographical, while her technique of inhabiting various personas, ranging from ancient Greek gods to garden flowers, renders her poems more than mere confessions. As the scholar Helen Vendler has noted: "In their obliquity and reserve, [Glück's poems] offer an alternative to first-person 'confession', while remaining indisputably personal".[10]

Themes[]

While Glück's work is thematically diverse, scholars and critics have identified several themes that are paramount. Most prominently, Glück's poetry can be said to focus on trauma, as she wrote throughout her career about death, loss, suffering, failed relationships, and attempts at healing and renewal.[11] The scholar Daniel Morris notes that even a Glück poem that uses traditionally happy or idyllic imagery "suggests the author's awareness of mortality, of the loss of innocence".[12] The scholar Joanne Feit Diehl echoes this notion when she argues that "this 'sense of an ending' … infuses Glück's poems with their retrospective power", pointing to her transformation of common objects, such as a baby stroller, into representations of loneliness and loss.[13] Yet, for Glück, trauma was arguably a gateway to a greater appreciation of life, a concept explored in The Triumph of Achilles. The triumph to which the title alludes is Achilles' acceptance of mortality—which enables him to become a more fully realized human being.[14]

Another of Glück's common themes is desire. Glück wrote directly about many forms of desire—for example, the desire for love or insight—but her approach is marked by ambivalence. Morris argues that Glück's poems, which often adopt contradictory points of view, reflect "her own ambivalent relationship to status, power, morality, gender, and, most of all, language".[15] The author Robert Boyer has characterized Glück's ambivalence as a result of "strenuous self-interrogation". He argues that "Glück's poems at their best have always moved between recoil and affirmation, sensuous immediacy and reflection … for a poet who can often seem earthbound and defiantly unillusioned, she has been powerfully responsive to the lure of the daily miracle and the sudden upsurge of overmastering emotion".[16] The tension between competing desires in Glück's work manifests both in her assumption of different personas from poem to poem and in her varied approach to each collection of her poems. This led the poet and scholar James Longenbach to declare that "change is Louise Glück's highest value" and "if change is what she most craves, it is also what she most resists, what is most difficult for her, most hard-won".[17]

Another of Glück's preoccupations was nature, the setting for many of her poems. In The Wild Iris, the poems take place in a garden where flowers have intelligent, emotive voices. However, Morris points out that The House on Marshland is also concerned with nature and can be read as a revision of the Romantic tradition of nature poetry.[18] In Ararat, too, "flowers become a language of mourning", useful for both commemoration and competition among mourners to determine the "ownership of nature as a meaningful system of symbolism".[19] Thus, in Glück's work nature is both something to be regarded critically and embraced. The author and critic Alan Williamson has said it can also sometimes suggest the divine, as when, in the poem "Celestial Music", the speaker states that "when you love the world you hear celestial music", or when, in "The Wild Iris", the deity speaks through changes in weather.[20]

Glück's poetry is also notable for what it avoids. Morris argues that

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Influences[]

Glück pointed to the influence of psychoanalysis on her work, as well as her early learning in ancient legends, parables, and mythology. In addition, she credited the influence of Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. Scholars and critics have pointed to the literary influence on her work of Robert Lowell,[21] Rainer Maria Rilke,[9] and Emily Dickinson,[22] among others.

Recognition[]

In October 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the sixteenth female literature laureate since the prize was founded in 1901.[23] Due to restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, she received her prize at her home.[24] In her Nobel lecture, which was delivered in writing, she highlighted her early engagement with poetry by William Blake and Emily Dickinson in discussing the relationship between poets, readers, and the wider public.[25]

Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris.

Glück received the National Book Critics Circle Award for  Triumph of Achilles and the Academy of American Poets Prize for Firstborn. 

In 2001 Yale University awarded Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the Guggenheim. and Rockefeller foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Glück was appointed the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003 through 2004, succeeding Billy Collins, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant 3 years earlier in 2000.[26]

She won a National Book Award in 2014 for her collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night.[27]

Publications[]

Poetry[]

  • Firstborn. New York: New American Library, 1968.
  • The House on Marshland. New York: Ecco Press, 1975.
  • The Garden. New York: Antaeus, 1976.
  • Descending Figure. New York: Ecco Press, 1980.
  • The Triumph of Achilles. New York: Ecco Press, 1985.
  • Ararat. New York: Ecco Press, 1990.
  • The Wild Iris. New York: Ecco Press, 1992.
  • The First Four Books of Poems. New York: Ecco Press, 1995.
  • Meadowlands. New York: Ecco Press, 1996.
  • Vita Nova. New York: Ecco Press, 1999.
  • The Seven Ages. New York: Ecco Press, 2001.
  • October (chapbook). Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2004.
  • Averno. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2006.
  • A Village Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2009.
  • Poems, 1962-2012. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2012.
  • Faithful and Virtuous Night. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2014.[28]

Non-fiction[]

  • Proofs and Theories: Essays on poetry. New York: Ecco Press, 1994.
  • Introduction to Spencer Reece, The Clerk’s Tale. Boston: Mariner Books, 2004.

Edited[]


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.[29]

Poet_Louise_Glück_reads_from_A_Village_Life

Poet Louise Glück reads from A Village Life

Audio / video[]

  • The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress — Favorite Poets: Louise Glück (includes interview by Grace Cabalieri). Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1999.[29]

See also[]

v · d · ePulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1976–2000
John Ashbery (1976)  • James Merrill (1977)  • Howard Nemerov (1978)  • Robert Penn Warren (1979)  • Donald Justice (1980)  • James Schuyler (1981)  • Sylvia Plath (1982)  • Galway Kinnell (1983)  • Mary Oliver (1984)  • Carolyn Kizer (1985)  • Henry S. Taylor (1986)  • Rita Dove (1987)  • William Meredith (1988)  • Richard Wilbur (1989)  • Charles Simic (1990)  • Mona Van Duyn (1991)  • James Tate (1992)  • Louise Glück (1993)  • Yusef Komunyakaa (1994)  • Philip Levine (1995)  • Jorie Graham (1996)  • Lisel Mueller (1997)  • Charles Wright (1998)  • Mark Strand (1999)  • C.K. Williams (2000)
 • Complete list  • (1918-1950)  • (1951-1975)  • (1976-2000)  • (2001-2025)  •


v · d · ePoet Laureate Consultants in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1937-2000
Joseph Auslander (1937)  • Allen Tate (1943)  • Robert Penn Warren (1944)  • Louise Bogan (1945)  • Karl Shapiro (1946)  • Robert Lowell (1947)  • Léonie Adams (1948) • Elizabeth Bishop (1949)  • Conrad Aiken (1950)  • William Carlos Williams (1952)  • Randall Jarrell (1956)  • Robert Frost (1958)  • Richard Eberhart (1959)  • Louis Untermeyer (1961)  • Howard Nemerov (1963)  • Reed Whittemore (1964)  • Stephen Spender (1965)  • James Dickey (1966)  • William Jay Smith (1968)  • William Stafford (1970)  • Josephine Jacobsen (1971)  • Daniel Hoffman (1973)  • Stanley Kunitz (1974) • Robert Hayden (1976)  • William Meredith (1978)  • Maxine Kumin (1981)  • Anthony Hecht (1982)  • Reed Whittemore (1984)  • Robert Fitzgerald (1984)  • Gwendolyn Brooks (1985)  • Robert Penn Warren (1986)  • Richard Wilbur (1987)  • Howard Nemerov (1988)  • Mark Strand (1990)  • Joseph Brodsky (1991)  • Mona Van Duyn (1992)  • Rita Dove (1993)  • Robert Hass (1995)  • Robert Pinsky (1997)  • Rita Dove / Louise Glück / W.S. Merwin (1999)  • Stanley Kunitz (2000)

References[]

Fonds[]

Glück's papers, including manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials, are housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.[30]

Notes[]

  1. ↑ PostClassic
  2. ↑ http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/art-news/2010/04/13/gluck-fuses-poetry-teaching-style/
  3. ↑ Risen, Clay (October 13, 2023). "Louise Glück, Nobel-Winning Poet Who Explored Trauma and Loss, Dies at 80". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/books/louise-gluck-dead.html. Retrieved October 13, 2023. 
  4. ↑ Teicher, Craig Morgan (August 4, 2017). "Deep Dives Into How Poetry Works (and Why You Should Care)" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/books/review/a-little-book-on-form-robert-hass-american-originality-louise-gluck.html. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Quinney, Laura (July 21, 2005). "Like Dolls with Their Heads Cut Off" (in en). London Review of Books 27 (14). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n14/laura-quinney/like-dolls-with-their-heads-cut-off. Retrieved April 7, 2020. 
  6. ↑ Cucinella, Catherine, ed (2002). Contemporary American Women Poets: An A-to-Z Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press. pp. 150–151. ISBN 978-1-4294-7550-1. OCLC 144590762. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/556e/88d648e8b39637eb4a33c8bae81334a83c66.pdf. 
  7. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Hahn-2004
  8. ↑ Baker, Robert (June 1, 2018). "Versions of Ascesis in Louise Glück's Poetry" (in en). The Cambridge Quarterly 47 (2): 131–154. doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfy011. ISSN 0008-199X. https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article/47/2/131/5026611. Retrieved April 7, 2020. 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Robbins, Michael (December 4, 2012). "The Constant Gardener: On Louise Glück". https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-constant-gardener-on-louise-gluck/. 
  10. ↑ Vendler, Helen (1980). Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 311. ISBN 978-0-674-65476-1. https://archive.org/details/partofnaturepart0004vend. 
  11. ↑ Cucinella, Catherine, ed (2002). Contemporary American Women Poets: An A-to-Z Guide. pp. 149. "Wounds—the death of a firstborn child, anorexia, failed relationships, sibling rivalry, a parent's death, divorce—form the foundation from which Glück's poetry arises." 
  12. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Morris
  13. ↑ Diehl, Joanne Feit, ed (2005). On Louise Glück: Change What You See. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 6–7. ISBN 978-0-472-11479-5. 
  14. ↑ ""The Ambivalence of Being in Gluck's The Triumph of Achilles" [by Caroline Malone"]. https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/01/the-ambivalence-of-being-in-glucks-the-triumph-of-achilles-opening-the-box-opening-the-book-opening-the-self-what-ofte.html. 
  15. ↑ Morris, Daniel. The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction. p. 73. 
  16. ↑ Boyers, Robert (November 20, 2012). "Writing Without a Mattress: On Louise Glück" (in en-US). The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/writing-without-mattress-louise-glueck/. 
  17. ↑ Longenbach, James (1999). "Louise Glück's Nine Lives". Southwest Review 84 (2): 184–198. ISSN 0038-4712. JSTOR 43472558. 
  18. ↑ Morris, Daniel. The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction. p. 2. 
  19. ↑ Morris, Daniel. The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction. p. 6. 
  20. ↑ Williamson, Alan (2005). "Splendor and Mistrust". In Diehl, Joanne Feit. On Louise Glück: Change What You See. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 65–66. 
  21. ↑ Gargaillo, Florian (September 29, 2017). "Sounding Lowell: Louise Glück and Derek Walcott" (in en-US). https://www.literarymatters.org/10-1-sounding-lowell-louise-gluck-and-derek-walcott/. 
  22. ↑ Diehl, Joanne Feit (2005). "Introduction". In Diehl, Joanne Feit. On Louise Glück: Change What You See. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 13, 20. 
  23. ↑ "Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel prize in literature" (in en). October 8, 2020. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/08/louise-gluck-wins-the-2020-nobel-prize-in-literature. 
  24. ↑ "Nobel ceremonies go low-key this year because of coronavirus". December 7, 2020. https://apnews.com/article/europe-oslo-nobel-prizes-coronavirus-pandemic-berlin-2eff5024db4fab77e46ead2f39f4bf20. 
  25. ↑ Glück, Louise. "The Nobel Lecture in Literature 2020" (in en-US). https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/lecture/. 
  26. ↑ "Former Poet Laureate Louise Glück". Library of Congress. 2009. http://www.loc.gov/poetry/more_gluck.html. Retrieved 2009-01-01. 
  27. ↑ Meredith Goldstein, "Cambridge poet wins National Book Award." Boston Globe, November 21, 2014.
  28. ↑ Faithful and Virtuous Night, Amazon.com. Web, Aug. 27, 2014.
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 Louise Glück b. 1943, Poetry Foundation, Web, Aug. 27, 2014.
  30. ↑ "Collection: Louise Glück papers | Archives at Yale". https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/5489/collection_organization. 

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