Louise Gluck

1) Her biography and Main Works: 

Born in New York City, in 1943, Louise Elisabeth Gluck became a prolific poet known for her ability to tackle the harsh and unpleasant aspects of life and write about them with insight and elegance. As a result of her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” she received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020. 

New York City’s Columbia University and the Bronxville’s Sarah Lawrence College influenced Glück’s career path, and she taught poetry at a number of prestigious universities after her graduation. Throughout Firstborn (1968), she utilized a series of first-person narrators, all of whom were either dissatisfied or furious. Many critics were displeased with the collection’s tone, while others were charmed by Glück’s masterful use of language and inventive use of rhyme and meter. The House on Marshland (1975), despite its dismal attitude, has a better command of voice. Gretel and Joan of Arc were only two of the historical and mythical characters included in Glück’s books. For example, in “The Sick Child,” from the collection Descending Figure (1980), she adopts the voice of the mother in a museum painting staring out at the bright gallery. Classic myths, fairy stories, and the Bible are all referenced in the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning collection of poems, The Triumph of Achilles (1985). In Ararat (1990), a film praised for its brutal honesty in examining the family and the ego, these themes are also addressed. 

The Wild Iris (1992) by Gluck, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Meadowlands (1996), The First Five Books of Poems (1997), and The Seven Ages (1998) are some of her most recent works. Persephone was the subject of her 2006 novel Averno. Her earlier writing is markedly different from the richly detailed manner of poems gathered in A Village Life (2009), which explores life in a tiny Mediterranean village. Poems 1962–2012 is a collection of all of the poet’s published works. Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), a National award-winning book by Gluck, explores mortality and midnight quiet from a masculine perspective. 

The Best American Poetry 1993 was edited by Glück. Proofs and Theories (1994) and American Originality (1995) were two of her poetry essay books. She received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 2001. In 2003 and 2004, Glück served as the Library of Congress’ poet laureate consultant on poetry. Wallace Stevens Award and National Humanities Medal were among her other accolades (2015). 

 2) Main Themes: 

Mortality and Trauma: 

Glück’s poetry is known for focusing on trauma, since she has written about death, grief, suffering, broken relationships, and efforts at healing and regeneration throughout her career. Even a Glück poem that utilizes standard cheerful or bucolic imagery “suggests the author’s 

awareness of mortality, of the loss of innocence,” according to historian Daniel Morris. This idea is echoed by historian Joanne Feit Diehl, who claims that “this’sense of an ending’… infuses Glück’s poems with their retrospective power,” referring to her transformation of everyday items like a baby carriage into symbols of loneliness and loss. Trauma, on the other hand, for Glück, is possibly a portal to a higher appreciation of life, a theme addressed in The Triumph of Achilles. Achilles’ acceptance of mortality—which allows him to become a more fully formed human being—is the victory to which the title refers. 

Desire: 

Desire is another of Glück’s recurring topics. Glück has written on many different types of need, such as the desire for love or knowledge, but her approach is ambivalent. Morris claims that Glück’s poems represent “her own ambivalent relationship to status, power, morality, gender, and, most of all, language,” since they often adopt contradicting points of view. Glück’s ambivalence has been described as the product of “strenuous self-interrogation” by author Robert Boyer. “Glück’s poems at their best have always moved between recoil and affirmation, sensuous immediacy and reflection… for a poet who can sometimes seem earthbound and defiantly unillusioned, she has been powerfully responsive to the lure of the daily miracle and the sudden upsurge of overmastering emotion,” he claims. In Glück’s work, the conflict between opposing wants is reflected in her use of multiple identities from poem to poem and in her approach to each collection of her poems. Change is Louise Glück’s ultimate value, according to poet and historian James Longenbach, and “if change is what she most craves, it is also what she most resists, what is most difficult for her, most hard-won.” 

Nature: 

Nature, which appears in several of Glück’s poetry, is another of her interests. The poems in The Wild Iris are set in a garden where flowers have knowledgeable and passionate voices. Morris, on the other hand, emphasizes that The House on Marshland is also about nature and may be understood as a reinterpretation of the Romantic tradition of nature poetry. “Flowers become a language of mourning” in Ararat, too, and are used for both memorial and competition among mourners to establish who owns “nature as a meaningful system of symbolism.” As a result, nature is both critically evaluated and embraced in Glück’s art. As author and critic Alan Williamson has pointed out, it may also allude to the divine, as when the speaker in the poem “Celestial Music” says, “When you love the world, you hear celestial music,” or when the god communicates via changes in weather in The Wild Iris. 

3) Importance of her Works Today: 

Louise Glück was named Nobel Literature Laureate for the year 2020. Thousands of individuals outed themselves as poetry fans on Instagram and Twitter, halting their US election tweets, 

tennis updates, and troll fights to fill the internet with lines from Glück’s poems. Many of her followers have followed her work for five decades, from Firstborn (1968) to Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), and a slew of honors ranging from the Pulitzer Prize to the Guggenheim. She covers such a wide variety of topics in her Collected Poems – history, mythologies, the rich murkiness of families — that it’s hard to condense the impact of over 700 pages of poetry into a few brief sentences. Poetry, on the other hand, has a certain value, particularly on social media, where haiku writers and Iranian dissidents find common ground. “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory,” a line from Glück’s poem “Nostos,” appeared on a hundred Twitter feeds and Instagram profiles at once, in Spanish, English, Russian, and Arabic, pausing the typical flow of Rumi quotations. 

Poets haven’t had a large audience in most of the west for decades, and poetry seldom makes the bestseller lists. However, there were signals of change prior to Covid-19; last year, the Nielsen BookScan revealed that poetry sales in the UK were increasing, and a poll by the National Endowment for the Arts verified that, beginning in 2017, more Americans were reading poetry. During the epidemic, internet readings, like Patrick Stewart’s daily recitals of Shakespeare’s sonnets, have exploded. The absence of rewards for poetry may have had an impact on its popularity. Only around 20 of the 113 Nobel Prizes for Literature have gone to full-time poets, and Glück is only the third woman to win one. There was no major worldwide poetry award honoring a poet’s body of work until recently, and many poetry prizes are still offered for a single poem or a debut book. 

The yearly Laurel Prize is a new prize for the greatest collection of nature or environmental poetry, financed by Simon Armitage from his honorarium as Poet Laureate. Pascale Petit, the first recipient, was honored earlier this month with Mama Amazonica, a unique collection of poems set amid the Amazon jungle and a mental facility. Bloggers gradually planted the seeds, and quotations from the book began to sprout: “Depression is a black caiman lying on the sand, mud-slicked from the deep, impassive in her armour.” 

Petit and Glück may not be as attractive to a younger audience as prominent Instapoets like Rupi Kaur and Lang Leav. However, as their art gains traction on social media, its themes — mental illness, the fragility of the natural environment, familial fractures — seem to resonate with a younger population looking for a contemplative break from their online lives. Protest poets have also found a home on Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms. 

The gap between protest rappers and classical poets like Louise Glück isn’t as wide as it seems. Glück comments about her aversion to “the special place – the secluded cabin, the writer’s retreat” — the entire image of poets as a rarefied species — in one of her interviews. Her inspirations have come from both mainstream and ancient mythology. She read “nothing but garden catalogues” for two years, which she turned into her 1992 book The Wild Iris. In 2000, Glück told an MIT colloquium audience what she’d been doing her whole life: “The task of the artist is to keep the obsessions from being boring, first to the artist.” It’s amazing for me to accomplish this.” We can rely on poetry by Louise Glück to help us get through the news cycle’s whims, pandemics, and plagues.