Louise Glück, America’s foremost lyric poet, sought the universal through the personal

A poet known for succinct candour, frequently tinged with melancholy, and seamlessly weaving allusions to classical mythology into a montage of memories and philosophical reflections, Glück had received almost all major literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for Wild Iris — a haunting exploration of life, death and the profound transformation that occurs in the space between the two as well as suffering and rebirth; and the National Book award in 2014 for Faithful and Virtuous Night, a meditation on mortality and nocturnal silence, heartbreaking and bristling with wonder, in which every familiar facet is made to ‘shimmer like the contours of a dream’ — a ‘single story with mysterious and fateful sweep, but mutable parts.’

Seeking out the universal through the personal

Glück also received the Bollingen prize for lifetime achievement in 2001, and the 2015 National Humanities Medal for her “decades of powerful lyric poetry that defies all attempts to label it definitively”. The Nobel committee praised Glück, the 16th woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize, for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. Drawing parallels with other writers, the Academy noted that Glück’s work bore similarities to the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson in her “severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith.”

“Personal experiences have always been an important touchstone for Louise Glück’s poetry. Childhood, family life, relationships and death are recurring themes in her collections… Myths and classical motifs are found in most of her work. In addition to classical mythology, the rich English-language poetry tradition is her primary literary source of inspiration. Glück’s language is characterised by clarity and precision and is free of poetic formalities; she often uses daily spoken language,” the Swedish Academy said in its citation.

The inheritance of loss

Born on April 22, 1943, in New York City, Louise Elizabeth Glück grew up in Cedarhurst on Long Island. While her father, Daniel Glück, was a businessman and a failed poet who also helped invent the X-Acto knife, her mother, (Beatrice Grosby) Glück, was a homemaker. Though she was a precocious child, her early education was interrupted by anorexia nervosa, which also seeped into the entire period of her adolescence and early 20s, preventing her from attending college. However, she took classes at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University, where she studied under the poets Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz.

It was therapy that shaped her ability to think and write. She received seven years of intensive psychoanalysis that “taught me to use my tendency to object, to articulate ideas about my own ideas, taught me to use doubt, to examine my own speech for its evasions and excisions,” she recalled during a 1989 lecture at the Guggenheim Museum. “The longer I withheld conclusion, the more I saw. I was learning, I believe, how to write, as well.”

Glück’s career took off in the mid-1960s when she began publishing poems in reputed magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation. During this phase, she worked as a secretary by day and wrote poetry in her free time. Her marriages to Charles Hertz Jr. in 1967, and John Dranow (with whom she shared a son, Noah) in 1977, ended in divorce. At the start of her career, she had declared that she did not want to become a teaching poet, but after she joined Goddard College in Vermont, she found, to her surprise, that she enjoyed teaching; she even began to draw inspiration from it. For the remainder of her life, she remained in the classroom, with teaching stints at Williams College, Yale and Stanford.

The American poet laureate

Her first book of poems, Firstborn, was published in 1968 when she was 23. Although it was followed by a period of writer’s block, she made a breakthrough in the literary world with her second book, The House on Marshland (1975). With subsequent works, like The Wild Iris and Ararat, she cemented herself as a great American poet. “The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last,” Glück, who served as the United States poet laureate from 2003 to 2004, once wrote.

Her works (14 poetry collections, various essays, and a prose fable titled Marigold and Rose) are deeply personal, and draw on her experiences, including her father’s death, her marriages, and her struggles with anorexia. And yet they resonate with universal appeal by effortlessly connecting individual experiences to broader themes of family, mortality, and loss. “Some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one,” she said in her Nobel speech.

The liminal space between life and death

The eponymous poem in The Wild Iris begins with the end of suffering, a doorway to the unknown, where the concept of death is remembered. Gluck paints a vivid picture of the aftermath, with the world continuing its existence, indifferent to the transition. ‘At the end of my suffering/there was a door. / Hear me out: that which you call death / I remember./Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. / Then nothing. The weak sun / flickered over the dry surface.’

The poem offers a unique perspective on survival, presenting consciousness as a buried entity in the dark earth. It is a bit unsettling, suggesting a lingering existence in the shadow of life, a survivor of death. The fear and silence associated with the soul’s inability to speak are palpable: ‘Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable/to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth/bending a little.’ However, the poem soon takes a hopeful turn as it suggests that the end is not absolute. The return from oblivion is characterised as a return to find a voice. The central metaphor of a great fountain emerging from the depths, with deep blue shadows on azure sea water, hints at the possibility of rebirth or rejuvenation. It implies that life can emerge from death, and the silenced voice can be reawakened. Glück invites us to contemplate the liminal space between life and death and the potential for renewal.

As seen in the verses above, Glück’s voice is frill-less, precise and clear. She speaks directly to us, urging us to be active participants. A great deal of her poetry also revolves around change, grief, and surviving. These themes became the thrust of Winter Recipes From the Collective (2022), much of which was written in the summer of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was raging around the world. In “Song,” a bittersweet poem from the collection, a character named Leo Cruz inspires Glück to dream of a world after the pandemic, when art is not merely a form of survival: “We make plans/to walk the trails together.”

Her early works, particularly Firstborn, reveal a poet immersed in a bleak and diseased world. Her poems in this collection delve into themes of brutal relationships, bitterness, disappointment, and her interactions with lovers, doctors, and family members. “The crocus spreads like cancer” in ‘Easter Season’. Another poem, ‘The Wound,’ is equally grim and morbid; her style in the collection, and her intense and elaborate use of language, are reminiscent of poets like Hart Crane and early Robert Lowell.

When she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, it inspired “panic,” she said in her acceptance speech. She feared that the newfound attention might make writing more difficult for her. But, as it turned out, it didn’t really affect her creative process. “Except when it is insanely easy, writing remains elusive. Always, I am someone longing to be a poet, to make something never heard before, to be taken out of myself. That it happened at all is a wonder,” she wrote in 2020.