Louise Glück

Louise Glück
Glück c. 1977
Glück c. 1977
BornLouise Elisabeth Glück
(1943-04-22)April 22, 1943
New York City, New York, U.S.
DiedOctober 13, 2023(2023-10-13) (aged 80)
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation
  • Poet
  • essayist
  • professor
Education
Period1968–2023
Notable works
Notable awards
Spouse
Charles Hertz Jr.
​
​
(m. 1967, divorced)​
John Dranow
​
​
(m. 1977; div. 1996)​
PartnerKeith Monley (1973–1975)
Children1
RelativesAbigail Savage (niece)

Louise Elisabeth Glück (April 22, 1943 – October 13, 2023) was an American poet. She won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her book The Wild Iris and National Book Award of Poetry in 2014 for her book Faithful and Virtuous Night. She was the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003. In 2020, she was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature.[1]

Early life

Glück was born and raised in New York City. As a teenager, Glück had anorexia.[2] She had psychoanalysis treatment done to help her with the illness.[3] She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and at Columbia University.

While attending poetry workshops in college, Glück began to publish her poems. Her first publication was in Mademoiselle, followed soon after by poems in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and other venues.[4][5]

After leaving Columbia, Glück was a private secretary.[6]

Career

In 1968, Glück published her first collection of poems, Firstborn. Many critics liked it.[7] However some said she was trying to copy Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath".[8] Following the publication, Glück had a long case of writer's block, which was not cured, she said, until 1971, when she began to teach poetry at Goddard College in Vermont.[6][9] The poems she wrote during this time were collected in her second book, The House on Marshland (1975).[10]

In 1980, Glück's third collection, Descending Figure, was published. It received some criticism for its tone and subject matter, with some saying the poem was about hating children.[11] However some critics did like it.[12] That same year, a fire destroyed Glück's house in Vermont, resulting in the loss of most of her things.[13]

After the fire, Glück began to write the poems that would later be in her award-winning work, The Triumph of Achilles (1985). Many critics liked this work with some calling it "sharper" than her other works.[14] One critic called her "among the important poets of our age" and made her a popular poet.[15] From the collection, the poem "Mock Orange", has been popular with feminists.[16][17]

In 1984, Glück began working with Williams College in Massachusetts.[18] Her next collection of poems, Ararat (1990), talked about loss since it was written after her father died.[19] Glück followed this collection with one of her most popular books, The Wild Iris (1992), which talked about the meaning of life.[20] It was well liked by critics with some calling it "a milestone work".[21] It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, making Glück's a popular American poet.[22]

In 1994, she published a collection of essays called Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry. She then created Meadowlands (1996), a collection of poetry about love and failing marriages.[23] 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 chapbook entitled October. It was one poem divided into six parts and was about ancient Greek myth to explore parts of trauma and suffering.[24] That same year, she began working with Yale University.[25]

Glück continued to publish poetry while working at Yale. She would go on to publish Averno (2006), A Village Life (2009), and Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). In 2012, a collection of her poems during her fifty-year career, entitled Poems: 1962–2012, was published.[26] Another collection of her essays, titled American Originality, was released in 2017.[27]

In October 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the sixteenth female literature laureate since the prize was founded in 1901.[28] Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she received her prize at her home.[29]

In 2021, Glück's collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective, was published. In 2022, she was promoted at Yale.[30] In 2023, she was made a professor of English at Stanford University.

Personal life

Glück married Charles Hertz Jr. in 1967, however the marriage ended in divorce.[13] In 1973, Glück gave birth to a son, Noah, with her partner, Keith Monley, however their relationship ended in 1975.[31] From 1977 until their divorce in 1996, she was married to John Dranow.

Glück's niece is the actress Abigail Savage.[32]

Glück died from cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 13, 2023, at the age of 80.[33]

Bibliography

Poetry
  • Firstborn (1968)
  • The House on Marshland (1975)
  • The Garden (1976)
  • Descending Figure (1980)
  • The Triumph of Achilles (1985)
  • Ararat (1990)
  • The Wild Iris (1992)
  • Mock Orange (1993)
  • The First Four Books of Poems (1995)
  • Meadowlands (1997)
  • Vita Nova (1999)
  • The Seven Ages (2001)
  • Averno (2006)
  • A Village Life (2009) (shortlisted for the 2010 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
Prose
  • Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994)

References

  1. ↑ "American poet Louise Gluck wins 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature". Dhaka Tribune. 8 October 2020.
  2. ↑ Glück, Louise. Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry. p. 11.
  3. ↑ "Louise Glück Biography and Interview". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement. Archived from the original on March 8, 2019. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  4. ↑ Zuba, Jesse (2016). The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 128. ISBN 978-1-4008-7379-1. OCLC 932268118.
  5. ↑ Ratiner, Steven (December 27, 2012). "Book World: Louise Gluck's 'Poems 1962–2012'". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved October 25, 2020.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Louise Glück". National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Archived from the original on February 6, 2020. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  7. ↑ Miklitsch, Robert (October 1, 1982). "Assembling a Landscape: The Poetry of Louise Gluck". Hollins Critic. 19 (4): 1. ISSN 0018-3644. Archived from the original on October 11, 2020. Retrieved November 25, 2020.
  8. ↑ Burt, Stephen (September 21, 2003). "The Laureate: Why Louise Gluck's intensely private poetry is just what the public needs". The Boston Globe. Retrieved November 25, 2020.
  9. ↑ Duffy, John J.; Hand, Samuel B.; Orth, Ralph H. (2003). The Vermont Encyclopedia. UPNE. p. 138. ISBN 978-1-58465-086-7.
  10. ↑ Morris, Daniel. The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction. p. 4.
  11. ↑ George, E. Laurie (1990). "The "Harsher Figure" of Descending Figure: Louise Gluck's "Dive into the Wreck"" (PDF). Women's Studies. 17 (3–4): 235–247. doi:10.1080/00497878.1990.9978808. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 31, 2017. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  12. ↑ KINZIE, MARY (1982). "Review of Descending Figure; Memory; Monolithos; The Southern Cross; Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems; Letters from a Father; Antarctic Traveller; Worldly Hopes". The American Poetry Review. 11 (5): 37–46. ISSN 0360-3709. JSTOR 27777028.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Morris, Daniel (2006). The Poetry of Louise Gluck: A Thematic Introduction. p. 29.
  14. ↑ Rosenberg, Liz (December 22, 1985). "Geckos, Porch Lights and Sighing Gardens". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on April 7, 2020. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  15. ↑ Stitt, Peter (1985). "Contemporary American Poems: Exclusive and Inclusive". The Georgia Review. 39 (4): 849–863. ISSN 0016-8386. JSTOR 41398888.
  16. ↑ Abel, Colleen (January 15, 2019). "Speaking Against Silence". The Ploughshares Blog. Archived from the original on April 7, 2020. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  17. ↑ Hahn, Robert (Summer 2004). "Transporting the Wine of Tone: Louise Gluck in Italian". Michigan Quarterly Review. XLIII (3). hdl:2027/spo.act2080.0043.313. ISSN 1558-7266.
  18. ↑ Williams College. "Poet Louise Glück at Williams College Awarded Coveted Bollingen Prize". Office of Communications. Archived from the original on April 7, 2020. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  19. ↑ Garner, Dwight (November 8, 2012). "Verses Wielded Like a Razor". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on April 7, 2020. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  20. ↑ "Wild Iris". Publishers Weekly. June 29, 1992. Archived from the original on April 7, 2020. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  21. ↑ "Images of Now and Then in Poetry's Mirror". The Christian Science Monitor. January 7, 1993. ISSN 0882-7729. Archived from the original on April 7, 2020. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  22. ↑ "The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück (The Ecco Press)". Pulitzer.org. Archived from the original on July 5, 2018. Retrieved October 8, 2020.
  23. ↑ "Louise Glück". Poetry Foundation. Archived from the original on August 29, 2020. Retrieved October 8, 2020.
  24. ↑ Azcuy, Mary Kate (2011), "Persona, Trauma and Survival in Louise Glück's Postmodern, Mythic, Twenty-First-Century 'October'", Crisis and Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 33–49, doi:10.1057/9780230306097_3, ISBN 978-0-230-30609-7
  25. ↑ Speirs, Stephanie (November 9, 2004). "Gluck waxes poetic on work". yaledailynews.com. Archived from the original on April 7, 2020. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  26. ↑ "Creative Paralysis". The American Scholar. December 6, 2013. Archived from the original on April 7, 2020. Retrieved April 7, 2020.
  27. ↑ "American Originality: Essays on Poetry". Good Reads. Archived from the original on July 2, 2017. Retrieved October 8, 2020.
  28. ↑ "Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel prize in literature". The Guardian. October 8, 2020. Retrieved October 9, 2020.
  29. ↑ "Nobel ceremonies go low-key this year because of coronavirus". AP NEWS. December 7, 2020. Retrieved December 7, 2020.
  30. ↑ "Louise Glück named Frederick Iseman Professor in the Practice of Poetry". YaleNews. May 11, 2022. Retrieved May 12, 2022.
  31. ↑ Floersch, Larry (2023-11-01). "State of Mind: Louise Glück (1943–2023): Food and Friendship: A Remembrance". The Montpelier Bridge. Retrieved 2023-11-14.
  32. ↑ "Obituary: Gluck, Tereze". legacy.com. December 19, 2018. Archived from the original on October 8, 2020.
  33. ↑ Risen, Clay (October 13, 2023). "Louise Glück, Nobel-Winning Poet Who Explored Trauma and Loss, Dies at 80". The New York Times. Retrieved October 13, 2023.

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