The Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 was awarded to poet Louise Glück, one of America’s most celebrated poets. Making the announcement at a news conference in Stockholm two weeks ago, Swedish Academy said, Glück was recognized for “her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Third female poet to win the Nobel Prize
Louise Glück, the 77-year-old, an adjunct professor at Yale University and whose name rhymes with the word ‘click’, is the fourth woman to win the prize for literature since 2010, and only the 16th since the Nobel prizes were first awarded in 1901. She is also the third woman to win the prize for poetry.
At the Nobel announcement, Anders Olsson, the chair of the prize-giving committee, praised her minimalist voice and especially poems that get to the heart of family life. “Louise Glück’s voice is unmistakable,” he said. “It is candid and uncompromising, and it signals this poet wants to be understood.” However, he said her voice was also “full of humour and biting wit.”
Her poetry are “characterised by a striving for clarity”, he added, comparing her with Emily Dickinson with her “severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith”. Immediately following the announcement, Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer of Nobel Media got a telephone call to Louise Glück. At the moment, her time at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts was quarter to 7 am. and she still couldn’t get the morning coffee too. So, she said in surprising, “I really have to have some coffee and something right now (before talking to you).” Later in an interview with New York Times, Glück said she was “completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet.”
“I thought my chances were very poor”
At that short morning interview with Adam Smith, she said, “I thought my chances were very poor, and that was fine, because I treasure my daily life and my friendships, and I didn’t want my friendships complicated, and I didn’t want my daily life sacrificed. But there’s also a kind of covetousness. You want your work honoured. Everyone does.” When asked about what the award meant to her, she said, “I have no idea. My first thought was ‘I won’t have any friends’ because most of my friends are writers. But then I thought ‘no, that won’t happen’. It’s too new, you know … I don’t know really what it means. And I don’t know whether … I mean it’s a great honour, and then of course there are recipients I don’t admire, but then I think of the ones that I do, and some very recent. I think, practically, I wanted to buy another house, a house in Vermont – I have a condo in Cambridge – and I thought ‘well, I can buy a house now’. But mostly I am concerned for the preservation of daily life with people I love.”
Early life of the poet
Louise Glück was born in New York City on April 22, 1943. She is indeed a European origin that encapsulates her name too (Glück). Her father, Daniel Glück was a businessman, and paternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews, emigrated to the United States before her father was born. Mother, Beatrice Glück (née Grosby) was of Russian-Jewish descent and graduated from Wellesley College though later became a housewife. His father also had an ambition to become a writer, but went into businessmen with his brother-in-law.
Glück had two sisters, one died before Glück was born while other, Tereze died in 2018 at the age of 73. Tereze worked at Citibank as a vice president and was also a writer, winning the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 1995 for her book May You Live in Interesting Times.
Glück grew up on Long Island. From an early age she was drawn to reading and writing poetry. Her parents read her classical mythology as bedtime stories, and she was transfixed by the tales of Greek gods and heroes — themes she would later explore in her work. Glück wrote some of her earliest verses when she was 5, and set her mind to becoming a poet when she was in her early teens. But she struggled with anorexia as a teenager, a disease she later attributed to her obsession with purity and achieving control, and almost starved herself to death before eventually recovering through therapy. Here is a section of her poem “Dedication to Hunger” about her disease:
It begins quietly
in certain female children:
the fear of death, taking as its form
dedication to hunger,
because a woman’s body
is a grave; it will accept
anything.
Because of the illness she had to quit the George W. Hewlett High School, in Hewlett, New York. She spent the next seven years in therapy and during that time she took a poetry class at Sarah Lawrence College. From 1963 to 1966, she enrolled in poetry workshops at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, which offered a degree program for non-traditional students. But Glück had to leave it without a degree. At that time, she had to support herself with secretarial work. However, at the University, she got a chance to study under Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz, veteran poets whom she owes a debt of gratitude to their mentorship in her development as a poet.
Married life
Glück married with Charles Hertz Jr. in 1967, but that marriage was ended in a divorce within a year. Then she started a relationship with John Dranow, an author who had started the summer writing program at Goddard College. In 1973, Glück gave birth to a son, Noah with her partner. Then in 1977, she and Dranow were married. But that marriage also ended with a divorce in early 1990s. Since then she lives alone.
Literary life
Glück published 12 collections of poetry and a few volumes of essays on poetry, including
Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (The Ecco Press, 1994) and American Originality: Essays on Poetry (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2017). Her writing is characterised by a striving for clarity, and focused on trauma, as she has written throughout her career about death, loss, rejection, the failure of relationships, and attempts at healing and renewal.
Yet, for Glück, trauma is arguably a gateway to a greater appreciation of life. And also her poetry is created in a spare, pared down and distilled language. Mostly she tried to write narrative poetry and they are like short stories. According to the Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, autobiographical background was significant in her poetry, but she is not a confessional poet, comparing her to Emily Dickinson. Glück’s work seeks the universal and she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, Olsson said.
Her first collection of poems was Firstborn, published in 1968. For that book, she received positive response from critics. But then she experienced a prolonged case of writer’s block. One reason for it was her disrupted marriage. However, she could overcome from that obstacle, when she began to teach poetry at Goddard College in Vermont. The poems she wrote during this time were collected in her second book, The House on Marshland (1975), which many critics have regarded as her breakthrough work, signaling her “discovery of a distinctive voice”.
Glück’s third collection, Descending Figure was published in 1983 and in the same year, a fire destroyed Glück’s house in Vermont, resulting in the loss of all of her possessions. In the wake of that tragedy, Glück began to write the poems that would later be collected in her award-winning work, The Triumph of Achilles (1985). Writing in The New York Times, the author and critic Liz Rosenberg described the collection as “clearer, purer and sharper” than Glück’s previous work. The critic Peter Stitt, writing in The Georgia Review, declared that the book showed Glück to be “among the important poets of our age.” From the collection, the poem ‘Mock Orange’, which has been likened to a feminist anthem, has been called an ‘anthology piece’ for how frequently it has appeared in poetry anthologies and college courses.
In 1984, Glück joined the faculty of Williams College in Massachusetts as a senior lecturer in the English Department. The following year, her father died. The loss prompted her to begin a new collection of poems, Ararat (1990), the title of which references the mountain of the Genesis flood narrative. Writing in The New York Times in 2012, the critic Dwight Garner called it “the most brutal and sorrow-filled book of American poetry published in the last 25 years.”
Glück followed this collection with one of her most popular and critically acclaimed books, The Wild Iris (1992), which, in its poems, features garden flowers in conversation with a gardener and a deity about the nature of life. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, cementing Glück’s reputation as a preeminent American poet.
While the 1990s brought Glück literary success, it was also a period of personal hardship as her marriage to John Dranow ended in divorce. However, in 1994, she published a collection of essays called Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry and then produced Meadowlands (1996), a collection of poetry about the nature of love and the deterioration of a marriage. She followed it with two more collections: Vita Nova (1999) and The Seven Ages (2001).
In 2004, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Glück published a book-length poem entitled October. Divided into six parts, the poem draws on ancient Greek myth to explore aspects of trauma and suffering.
That same year, she was named the Rosenkranz Writer in Residence at Yale University. Since joining the faculty of Yale, Glück has continued to publish poetry. Her books published during this period include Averno (2006), A Village Life (2009), and Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). In 2012, the publication of a collection of a half-century’s worth of her poems, entitled Poems: 1962–2012, was called ‘a literary event’. Another collection of her essays, entitled American Originality, appeared in 2017. Her next poetry book will be launched next year titled Winter Recipes From the Collective as a Farrar, Straus and Giroux publication.
Critical acclaim
Glück is best known for lyric poems of linguistic precision and austere 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”. The scholar Laura Quinney has argued that her careful use of words has put Glück into “the line of American poets who value fierce lyric compression,” from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop. Glück’s poems rarely use rhyme, instead relying on repetition, enjambment and other techniques to achieve rhythm.
According to a veteran critic William Logan, Glück’s world is as close to Darwinian savagery as any a poet has invented (her psyche red in tooth and claw), but it would be a mistake not to see how vulnerable she is beneath her brutal observations. In his New York Times review on August 27, 2009, he writes, “Glück is perhaps the most popular literary poet in America. She doesn’t have the audience of Mary Oliver or Billy Collins, whose books rise to the top of the poetry best-seller list (even poets are surprised to learn there is one) and stay there, as if they had taken out a long-term lease. Glück is too private and cunning a poet ever to win too many friends — indeed, part of her cachet is that her poems are like secret messages for the initiated.”
He said, “Her early poems were all elbows and knees, Plathian with a rakish edge, full of wordplay and tight jazzy rhythms. Glück became a minimalist’s minimalist, moody, anxious to her fingertips — a nail biter’s nail biter.” Daniel Mendelsohn, the editor at large for The New York Review of Books views, “When you read her poems about these difficult things, you feel cleansed rather than depressed. This is one of the purest poetic sensibilities in world literature right now. It’s a kind of absolute poetry, poetry with no gimmicks, no pandering to fads or trends. It has the quality of something standing almost as outside of time.”
Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishing house and the editor of Glück said, “Her work is like an inner conversation. Maybe she’s talking to herself, maybe she’s talking to us. There’s a kind of irony to it.” He said, “One thing that’s very constant in her work is that inner voice. She’s always evaluating experience against some ideal that it never matches.”
The poet Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker, “Her poems are flash bulletins from her inner life, a region that she examines unsparingly.”
Art of poetry
In a Q and A interview, Louise Glück describes her art of poetry. There she says, when she tries to put a poem or a book together, she feels like a tracker in the forest following a scent, tracking only step to step. “It’s not as though I have plot elements grafted onto the walls elaborating themselves. Of course, I have no idea what I’m tracking, only the conviction that I’ll know it when I see it.” (Internal Tapestries:Interviewed by William Giraldi September/ October 2014)
There she elaborates, “I depend on that ignorance, on not seeing to the end of the book, because if I have an idea, initially it’s likely to be the wrong idea. I mean my ideas come later, after the fact. Ideas are not a part of how I conceive of a book.” The main difference between a fiction writer and a non-fiction writer is that non-fiction writer depends on the facts while the fiction writer doesn’t. A poet is also like that. He does not care about the facts, but the imagination. Louise Glück describes this as follows: “I want to substitute tone for fact. If you can get right the tone, it will be dense with ideas; you don’t initially know fully what they are, but you want by the end to know fully what they are or you won’t have made an exciting work.
For me it’s tone—the way the mind moves as it performs its acts of meditation. That’s what you’re following. It guides you but it also mystifies you because you can’t turn it into conscious principles or say precisely what its attributes are. The minute you turn tone into conscious principle it goes dead. It has to remain mysterious to you. You have to be surprised by what it is capable of unveiling. As you work on a book of poems you begin to understand what is at issue, but I don’t have any attitude toward the facts. I would prefer the notion that a poet turns ideas and abstractions into facts, rather than the other way around.”
(Internal Tapestries:Interviewed by William Giraldi September/ October 2014)
Glück does not care about the audience too. Instead of audience, she is into the reader,
“I never think of audience. I hate that word. I think of a reader. I think my poems want a reader, and they’re completed by a reader. But it’s the single reader, and whether that person exists in multiple or not makes no spiritual difference, though it has practical impact. What matters to me is the reader’s subtlety and depth of response and whether these prove durable. The idea of enlarging the audience for poetry seems to me ludicrous.” (A 2009 interview with American Poet)
She mentioned, “I think the poem is a communication between a mouth and an ear—not an actual mouth and an actual ear, but a mind that sends a message and a mind that receives it. For me, the aural experience of a poem is transmitted visually. I hear with my eyes and dislike reading aloud and (except on very rare occasions) being read to. The poem becomes, when read aloud, a much simpler, sequential shape: the web becomes a one-way street. In any case, the knowledge, or hope, that the reader exists is a great solace.”
At the New York Times interview just after the Nobel announcement, she said “Sometimes I write conversationally. (But) You don’t work on a voice. The sentence finds a way to speak itself. This sounds so Delphic. It’s a hard thing to discuss, a voice. I think I am fascinated by syntax and always felt its power, and the poems that moved me most greatly were not the most verbally opulent.” In 2000 at an MIT colloquium, Glück explained her task as a poetess: “The task of the artiste is to keep the obsessions from being boring, first to the artiste. I do this because it’s thrilling.” We excerpt a poem,
Snow Drops from Louise Glück’ Pulitzer Prize winning poetry book
The Wold Iris.
Snow drops
Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.
I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring – afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy in the raw wind of the new world.
Compiled by
Ravindra Wijewardhane