Louise Glück
Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Considered by many to be one of America’s most talented contemporary poets, Glück was known for her poetry’s technical precision, sensitivity, and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death. The poet Robert Hass called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.” In 2020, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Glück authored 13 books of poetry, including the collections Winter Recipes from the Collective (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), Faithful and Virtuous Night (FSG, 2014), winner of the National Book Award, and Poems 1962–2012 (FSG, 2013), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as American Originality: Essays on Poetry (FSG, 2017).
Glück’s early books feature personae grappling with the aftermaths of failed love affairs, disastrous family encounters, and existential despair. In her later work, she continued to explore the agony of the self. Her first book of poetry, Firstborn (New American Library, 1968), was recognized for its technical control as well as its collection of disaffected, isolated narratives. Helen Vendler commented on the use of story in Glück’s second collection, The House on Marshland (The Ecco Press, 1975) in her New Republic review. “Glück’s cryptic narratives invited our participation: we must, according to the case, fill out the story, substitute ourselves for the fictive personages, invent a scenario from which the speaker can utter her lines, decode the import, ‘solve’ the allegory,” Vendler maintained. She added that “later, I think ... we read the poem, instead, as a truth complete within its own terms, reflecting some one of the innumerable configurations into which experience falls.” According to poet-critic Rosanna Warren, Glück’s “power [was] to distance the lyric ‘I’ as subject and object of attention” and to “impose a discipline of detachment upon urgently subjective material.”
Glück’s poems in books such as Firstborn, The House on Marshland, The Garden (Antaeus Editions, 1976), Descending Figure (The Ecco Press, 1980), The Triumph of Achilles (The Ecco Press, 1985), Ararat (The Ecco Press, 1990), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris (The Ecco Press, 1992) invite readers to explore their deepest, most intimate feelings. Her ability to write poetry many people can understand, relate to, and experience intensely and completely stems from her deceptively straightforward language and poetic voice.
In a Washington Post Book World review of Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles, Wendy Lesser noted that “‘direct’ is the operative word here: Glück’s language is staunchly straightforward, remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech. Yet her careful selection for rhythm and repetition, and the specificity of even her idiomatically vague phrases, give her poems a weight that was far from colloquial.” Lesser went on to remark that “the strength of that voice derives in large part from its self-centeredness—literally, for the words in Glück’s poems seem to come directly from the center of herself.”
As Glück wrote so effectively about disappointment, rejection, loss, and isolation, reviewers frequently referred to her poetry as “bleak” or “dark.” The Nation’s Don Bogen felt that Glück’s “basic concerns” were “betrayal, mortality, love and the sense of loss that accompanies it... She is at heart the poet of a fallen world.” Readers and reviewers have also marveled at Glück’s gift for writing poetry with a dreamlike quality that at the same time deals with the realities of passionate and emotional subjects. Holly Prado declared in a Los Angeles Times Book Review piece on The Triumph of Achilles that Glück’s poetry works “because she has an unmistakable voice that resonates and brings into our contemporary world the old notion that poetry and the visionary are intertwined.”
Glück’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, The Wild Iris, clearly demonstrates her visionary poetics. Written in three segments, the book is set in a garden and imagines three voices: the gardener-poet, flowers speaking to the gardener-poet, and an omniscient god-like figure. In the New Republic, Helen Vendler described how “Glück’s language revived the possibilities of high assertion, assertion as from the Delphic tripod. The words of the assertions, though, were often humble, plain, usual; it was their hierarchic and unearthly tone that distinguished them. It was not a voice of social prophecy but of spiritual prophecy—a tone that not many women had the courage to claim.”
Meadowlands (The Ecco Press, 1996), Glück’s first new work after The Wild Iris, takes its impetus from Greek and Roman mythology. Through the voices of Odysseus and Penelope, Glück creates “a kind of high-low rhetorical experiment in marriage studies,” according to Deborah Garrison in the New York Times Book Review. Garrison added that, through the “suburban banter” between the ancient wanderer and his wife, Meadowlands “captures the way that a marriage itself has a tone, a set of shared vocal grooves inseparable from the particular personalities involved and the partial truces they’ve made along the way.”
Vita Nova (HarperCollins Publishers, 1999) earned Glück the prestigious Bollingen Prize from Yale University. In an interview with Brian Phillips of the Harvard Advocate, Glück said: “This book was written very, very rapidly... Once it started, I thought, this is a roll, and if it means you’re not going to sleep, okay, you’re not going to sleep.” Although the ostensible subject matter of the collection is the examination of the aftermath of a broken marriage, Vita Nova is suffused with symbols drawn from both personal dreams and classic mythological archetypes. Glück’s next collection, The Seven Ages (The Ecco Press, 2001), similarly takes up both myth and the personal in forty-four poems with subject matter ranging from her earliest memories to the contemplation of death. In her next book, Averno, the myth of Persephone is the touchstone: the poems circle the bonds between mothers and daughters, Glück’s own fears of aging, and a narrative concerning a modern-day Persephone.
In the New York Times, Nicholas Christopher wrote of Glück’s unique interest in “tapping the wellsprings of myth, collective and personal, to fuel [her] imaginations and, with hard-earned clarity and subtle music, to struggle with some of our oldest, most intractable fears—isolation and oblivion, the dissolution of love, the failure of memory, the breakdown of the body and destruction of the spirit.”
William Logan called Glück’s A Village Life (FSG, 2009), “a subversive departure for a poet used to meaning more than she can say.” The poems rely on long lines to achieve novelistic or short story-like effects. Logan compared A Village Life to a latter-day Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Mastersin its use of “the village as a convenient lens to examine the lives within, which counterpoint the memories of her [Glück’s] life without.” Dana Goodyear, reviewing the book for the Los Angeles Times found A Village Life “electrifying,” even as it presumes to tell its “polite” story of a “dying agricultural community, probably in Italy, probably some time between the 1950s and today.” Goodyear added: “Ordinariness is part of the risk of these poems; in them, Glück hazards, and dodges, sentimentality. The near miss makes us shiver.”
Glück’s selected Poems 1962–2012 was published to great acclaim. While it highlights her fierceness and “raking moral intensity,” New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner noted the collection also allowed readers to see the arc of Glück’s formal and thematic development. Adam Plunkett also reviewed the book in the New Republic:“Very few writers share her talent for turning water into blood. But what emerges from this new, comprehensive collection—spanning the entirety of her career—is a portrait of a poet who has issued forth a good deal of venom but is now writing, excellently, in a softer vein.”
In 2003, Glück was named the 12th US Poet Laureate. That same year, she was named the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a position she held until 2010. Her book of essays Proofs & Theories (HarperCollins, 1994) was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.
In addition to the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, Glück received many awards and honors for her work, including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, a National Humanities Medal, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. She died in 2023.