Louise Glück

Poet

• Born: April 22, 1943
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature and many other honors, demonstrates in her poetry her control of language and her technical skills with rhythm, sound, and diction. Her work encompasses a wide range of resources, including the natural world, cultural artifacts, and lived experience.

AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Literature

Early Life

Louise Glück was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island in a family of assimilated Jews. Her father, Daniel, was of Hungarian Jewish descent. Although he had aspirations of becoming a writer, he gave them up to become a businessperson. He is known for marketing the X-Acto knife. Her mother, Beatrice, was educated at Wellesley. Glück was the first surviving child of the couple; their first daughter had died at birth. By the time she was a high school senior, Glück was deathly ill with anorexia, an eating disorder. To overcome the illness, she began a seven-year study of psychoanalysis, which not only saved her life but also taught her discipline and attention to language.

Glück attended Sarah Lawrence college, then transferred to Columbia University, where she studied writing. She studied for two years with Leonie Adams. Upon realizing that the two differed in stylistic tastes, Glück began studying with Stanley Kunitz. From Kunitz, she received confirmation that she was indeed a poet, even if sometimes her poems were not good. In 1966, she won the Academy of American Poets Prize from Columbia University and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. The following year, she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. In 1967, she married Charles Hertz, Jr., with whom she had a son, Noah Benjamin Hertz, in 1973. The couple later divorced. Glück’s first collection of poetry, Firstborn, was published in 1968. She began teaching in 1970 at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Early in her career, Glück taught at numerous colleges, including Goddard College in Vermont, the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, the University of Iowa, the University of California, Davis, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Glück continued winning awards, earning the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry Magazine in 1971 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975. Her second book, The House on Marshland, was published in 1975, and her third collection, The Garden, was published in 1976. In 1977, she married John Dranow, a writer, whom she later divorced.

Life’s Work

Glück was known for her stylistic transformations between collections that, at the same time, retained her unique voice. Though the poems of her first collection, Firstborn, are often compared to the confessional lyrics of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, Glück distanced herself from these poets in her second collection, The House on Marshland. This collection includes “Abishag,” which retells the story of a minor character associated with King David. Such retellings, as a form of midrash, or interpretation of biblical stories, placed Glück’s poetry within the Jewish tradition.

Her fourth collection, Descending Figure, published in 1980, ends with “Lamentations,” a similar retelling based on the creation myth found in Genesis. In addition, in this collection, Glück developed her use of sequences, providing her poetry with a larger sense of context and complexity.

In 1983, Glück began a lengthy tenure teaching at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Her fifth collection, The Triumph of Achilles, published in 1985, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and incorporates Greek myths. Ararat, published in 1990, was a pivotal shift in its conception as a book-length poem sequence. One of her most autobiographical works, it focused on her immediate family and the theme of death. The Wild Iris, published in 1992, is one of Glück’s most critically acclaimed works. It received a Pulitzer Prize and a William Carlos Williams Award. Poems in this collection appear in the voice of a gardener, in the voices of the flowers of the garden, and in the voice of God. Proofs and Theories, published in 1994, is a collection of nonfiction essays and contains the autobiographical essay “Education of a Poet” and “On Stanley Kunitz,” about her mentor. This book won a Martha Albrand Award for nonfiction. Meadowlands, published in 1996, explores the dissolution of Glück’s second marriage, juxtaposing autobiography with mythic retellings of the return of Odysseus to Penelope.

Glück again mined Greek myth for Vita Nova (1999), in particular, the story of Dido and Aeneas and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. This book received the prestigious Bollingen Prize from Yale. The Seven Ages (2001) is one of her most comprehensive collections and serves somewhat as a recollection of her human lifespan. Glück served as the United States Poet Laureate between 2003 and 2004. In 2004, she left Williams College and began teaching at Yale. Averno, published in 2006, traces Persephone’s descent into hell and explores relationships with mothers and lovers. It includes “October,” a long poem previously published separately as a chapbook. She served as judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets between 2003 and 2010.

Glück published several other works in the 2000s and 2010s, including the poetry collections A Village Life (2009); Poems, 1962–2012 (2012), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), winner of the National Book Award.

On October 8, 2020, Glück received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” The prize was worth 10 million Swedish krona, or approximately $1.1 million.

Significance

With a literary career spanning more than fifty years, Glück received every major award in American poetry and, with the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, the most prestigious international award as well. Although she refused to align herself with a particular camp (for example, feminism), her work is analyzed through a variety of lenses: feminist, ecofeminist, psychoanalytic, spiritual, Jewish. A lyric poet, she was known for expanding the depth and complexity of the simple short lyric through the use of multiple voices, classical Greek and biblical narratives, and poetic sequences. About midway in her career, she began to write the book-length sequence, in which all the poems in a volume create the sense of one long poem. Her entire body of work could likely be read as a sequence itself. Her landscapes are most often bleak, her theme is usually loss or rejection, her attitude toward the physical human body and its hungers and imperfections is negative, sometimes bordering on disgust, and her tone is distanced and controlled. Glück died on October 17, 2023, at the age of eighty.

Bibliography

Alter, Alexandra, and Alex Marshall. “Louise Glück Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature.” The New York Times, 8 Oct. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/books/nobel-prize-literature-winner.html. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.

Chiasson, Dan. “View from the Mountain.” Rev. of Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück. New Yorker. Condé Nast, 20 Oct. 2014. Web.

Diel, Joanne Feit, ed. On Louise Glück: Change What You See. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. Print.

Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. Hopewell: Ecco, 1994. Print.

Gordon, Maggie. “A Woman Writing About Nature: Louise Glück and the Absence of Intention.” Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Ed. J. Scott Bryson. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2002. Print.

Gregerson, Linda. “The Sower against Gardens.” Negative Capability. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. Print.

Keniston, Ann. “Buried with the Romantics: Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris.” Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

“Louise Glück.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2014. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Morris, Daniel. The Poetry of Louise Glück. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006. Print.

Toibin, Colm. "Louise Glück: A Poet Who Never Shied Away from Silence, Pain, or Fear." The Guardian, 17 Oct. 2023, www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/17/louise-gluck-a-poet-who-never-shied-away-from-silence-pain-or-fear. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.

Upton, Lee. “Fleshless Voices: Louise Glück’s Rituals of Abjection and Oblivion.” The Muse of Abandonment. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1998. Print.