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Poetic voice of ‘austere beauty’ wins Nobel
Louise Glück has been publishing poetry for more than 60 years
October 15, 2020 10:51
By, BY david herman
2 min read
Louise Glück has been publishing poetry for more than 60 years
October 15, 2020 10:51ByDavid Herman, BY david herman
Louise Glück was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature last week “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
A Jewish-American poet and essayist, she has been publishing poetry for more than 60 years.
She has won many major literary awards in the United States, including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and Bollingen Prize, among others. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.
Ms Glück was born in New York on April 22, 1943, two years after Bob Dylan, the last American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is the eldest of two surviving daughters of Daniel Glück and Beatrice Glück. Her paternal grandparents, Hungarian Jews, emigrated to the United States. Her father was the first member of his family born in America.
As a teenager, she struggled for years with anorexia nervosa and was taken out of school while she had treatment. She wrote later, “I understood that at some point I was going to die. What I knew more vividly, more viscerally, was that I did not want to die.”
As a result of her illness, she missed out on full-time university education. She wrote in Proofs and Theories, “…my emotional condition, my extreme rigidity of behaviour and frantic dependence on ritual made other forms of education impossible”.
Firstborn, her first collection of poems, was published in 1968. It was the first of 14 books of poetry. She also published two books of essays on poetry: Proofs and Theories (1994) and American Originality (2017). Her collected poems were published in 2012. The New Yorker called it “a big book by a poet who values, above all, intensity of address, leanness of sentiment, and precision of speech: 50 years of excisions, refusals, and corrections, on longitudinal view.”
In his review, Dan Chiasson described her poems as “flash bulletins from her inner life, a region that she examines unsparingly.”
Born into a Jewish family, her poems are not included in any of the major anthologies of Jewish-American literature. There is just one reference to her in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature. Her poems are more classical than Jewish.
Ms Glück, said the Academy when awarding her the Nobel Prize, “seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works.”
One collection was called Averno, named after a lake the Romans mythologized as the entrance to the underworld. The Greek myth of Persephone and her marriage to Hades is a recurring topic in the collection. Earlier books of poetry were called The Triumph of Achilles and Vita Nova.
According to the Jewish Virtual Library, however, “in The Triumph of Achilles (1985), she creates her own midrashic interpretation of a story from the Midrash Rabbah and measures her immigrant grandfather’s life against that of Joseph in Egypt.”
But perhaps her most powerful themes are families, children and, above all, the body. In Crossroads, in her book A Village Life (2009), she writes, “My body, now that we will not be travelling together much longer, I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar, like what I remember of love when I was young — This is a boast: wherever the body ends up, this voice is not going to go away.”