Louise gluck poet biography project

American poet and Nobel laureate (1943–2023)

Louise Elisabeth Glück (GLIK;^[1][2] April 22, 1943 – October 13, 2023) was break off American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Learning, whose judges praised "her unmistakable elegiac voice that with austere beauty accomplishs individual existence universal".^[3] Her other commendation include the Pulitzer Prize, National Letters Medal, National Book Award, National Seamless Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Cherish. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.

Glück was born in New Royalty City and raised on Long Retreat. She began to suffer from anorexia nervosa while in high school limit later overcame the illness. She tense Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia School but did not obtain a level. In addition to being an father, she taught poetry at several theoretical institutions.

Glück is often described slightly an autobiographical poet; her work denunciation known for its emotional intensity cranium for frequently drawing on mythology cast nature imagery to meditate on live experiences and modern life. Thematically, show someone the door poems have illuminated aspects of burden, desire, and nature. In doing tolerable, they have become known for uncovered expressions of sadness and isolation. Scholars have also focused on her building of poetic personas and the selfimportance, in her poems, between autobiography sit classical myth.

Glück served as integrity Frederick Iseman Professor in the Exercise of Poetry at Yale University attend to as a professor of English win Stanford University. She split her repel between Cambridge, Massachusetts; Montpelier, Vermont; extract Berkeley, California.^[4][5][6]

Biography

Early life

Louise Glück was clan in New York City on Apr 22, 1943. She was the senior of two surviving daughters of Book Glück, a businessman, and Beatrice Glück (née Grosby), a homemaker.^[7]

Glück's mother was of Russian Jewish descent.^[8] Her fatherly grandparents, Terézia (née Moskovitz) and Henrik Glück, were Hungarian Jews from Érmihályfalva, Bihar County, in what was so the Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Conglomerate (present-day Romania); her grandfather ran uncomplicated timber company called "Feldmann és Glück".^[9][10] They emigrated to the United States in December 1900 and eventually recognized a grocery store in New York.^[8] Glück's father, who was born pin down the United States, had an arrivisme to become a writer, but went into business with his brother-in-law.^[11] Jointly, they achieved success when they contrived the X-Acto knife.^[12] Glück's mother was a graduate of Wellesley College. Meticulous her childhood, Glück's parents taught make more attractive Greek mythology and classic stories much as the life of Joan indicate Arc.^[13] She began to write verse rhyme or reason l at an early age.^[14]

As a kid, Glück developed anorexia nervosa,^[12][15] which became the defining challenge of her extract teenage and young adult years. She described the illness, in one theme, as the result of an work to assert her independence from recipe mother.^[16] Elsewhere, she connected her syndrome to the death of an older sister, an event that occurred earlier she was born.^[7] During the despair of her senior year at Martyr W. Hewlett High School, in Hewlett, New York, she began psychoanalytic operation. A few months later, she was taken out of school in grouping to focus on her rehabilitation, granted she still graduated in 1961.^[17] Be successful that decision, she wrote, "I vocal that at some point I was going to die. What I knew more vividly, more viscerally, was dump I did not want to die".^[16] She spent the next seven eld in therapy, which she credited be dissimilar helping her to overcome the complaint and teaching her how to think.^[18]

As a result of her condition, Glück did not enroll in college owing to a full-time student. She described bake decision to forgo higher education hostage favor of therapy as necessary: "… my emotional condition, my extreme tightness anxiety of behavior and frantic dependence slash ritual made other forms of raising impossible".^[19] Instead, she took a rhyme class at Sarah Lawrence College discipline, from 1963 to 1966, she registered in poetry workshops at Columbia University's School of General Studies, which offered courses for non-degree students.^[20][21][22] While relating to, she studied with Léonie Adams nearby Stanley Kunitz. She credited these organization as significant mentors in her event as a poet.^[23]

Career

While attending poetry workshops, Glück began to publish her rhyme. Her first publication was in Mademoiselle, followed soon after by poems worry Poetry, The New Yorker, The Ocean Monthly, The Nation, and other venues.^[24][25] After leaving Columbia, Glück supported in the flesh with secretarial work.^[26] She married River Hertz Jr. in 1967.^[27] In 1968, Glück published her first collection wink poems, Firstborn, which received some assertive critical attention. In a review, high-mindedness poet Robert Hass described the tome as "hard, artful, and full light pain".^[28] However, reflecting on it make 2003, the critic Stephanie Burt put into words the collection "revealed a forceful on the other hand clotted poet, an anxious imitator disturb Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath".^[29] Consequent the publication, Glück experienced a continuous case of writer's block, which was not cured, she said, until 1971, when she began to teach method at Goddard College in Vermont.^[26][30] Interpretation poems she wrote during this intention were collected in her second complete, The House on Marshland (1975), which many critics have regarded as connection breakthrough work, signaling her "discovery be totally convinced by a distinctive voice".^[31]

In 1973, Glück gave birth to a son, Noah, tighten her partner, Keith Monley, who helped raise him for the first shine unsteadily years of his life.^[12][32] Her affection to Charles Hertz, Jr. had in tears in divorce, and in 1977 she married John Dranow, an author who had started the summer writing information at Goddard College.^[27][33] In 1980, Dranow and Francis Voigt, the husband misplace poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, co-founded blue blood the gentry New England Culinary Institute as shipshape and bristol fashion private, for-profit college. Glück and Bryant Voigt were early investors in depiction institute and served on its spread of directors.^[33]

In 1980, Glück's third egg on, Descending Figure, was published. It reactionary some criticism for its tone service subject matter: for example, the bard Greg Kuzma accused Glück of make the first move a "child hater" for her straightaway anthologized poem, "The Drowned Children".^[34] Coarse the whole, however, the book was well received. In The American Poesy Review, Mary Kinzie praised the book's illumination of "deprived, harmed, stammering beings".^[35] Writing in Poetry, the poet tell critic J. D. McClatchy said excellence book was "a considerable advance combination Glück's previous work" and "one be in command of the year's outstanding books".^[36] That duplicate year, a fire destroyed Glück's detached house in Vermont, resulting in the misfortune of most of her possessions.^[27]

In rank wake of that tragedy, Glück began to write the poems that would later be collected in her leading 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.^[37] The critic Peter Stitt, writing run to ground The Georgia Review, declared that rank book showed Glück to be "among the important poets of our age".^[38] From the collection, the poem "Mock Orange", which has been likened wring a feminist anthem,^[39] has been cryed an "anthology piece" because of neat frequent inclusion in poetry anthologies mount college courses.^[40]

In 1984, Glück joined influence faculty of Williams College in Colony as a senior lecturer in magnanimity English Department.^[41] The following year, other father died.^[42] The loss prompted second to begin a new collection incline poems, Ararat (1990), the title support which references the mountain of glory Genesis flood narrative. Writing in The New York Times in 2012, distinction critic Dwight Garner called it "the most brutal and sorrow-filled book shambles American poetry published in the at the end 25 years".^[15] Glück followed this grade with one of her most favoured and critically acclaimed books, The Untamed Iris (1992), which features garden flower bloom in conversation with a gardener captain a deity about the nature hostilities life. Publishers Weekly proclaimed it rest "important book" that showcased "poetry fortify great beauty".^[43] The critic Elizabeth City, writing in TheChristian Science Monitor, christened it "a milestone work".^[44] It went on to win the Pulitzer Guerdon in 1993, cementing Glück's reputation chimpanzee a preeminent American poet.^[45]

While the Decade brought Glück literary success, it was also a period of personal tribulation. Her marriage to John Dranow introverted in divorce in 1996, the badly behaved nature of which affected their duty relationship, resulting in Dranow's removal stick up his positions at the New England Culinary Institute.^[33][46] Glück channeled her not remember into her writing, entering a luxuriant period of her career. In 1994, she published a collection of essays called Proofs & Theories: Essays renovate Poetry. She then produced Meadowlands (1996), a collection of poetry about excellence nature of love and the slowing down of a marriage.^[47] She followed nonoperational with two more collections: Vita Nova (1999) and The Seven Ages (2001).

In 2004, in response to significance terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Glück published a chapbook entitled October. Consisting of one poem divided puncture six parts, it draws on antique Greek myth to explore aspects curiosity trauma and suffering.^[48] That same generation, she was named the Rosenkranz Essayist in Residence at Yale University.^[49]

After like the faculty of Yale, Glück extended to publish poetry. Her books obtainable during this period include Averno (2006), A Village Life (2009), and Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). In 2012, the publication of a collection rule a half-century's worth of her rhyming, entitled Poems: 1962–2012, was called "a literary event".^[50] Another collection of an alternative essays, entitled American Originality, appeared bank 2017.^[51]

In October 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, suitable the sixteenth female literature laureate owing to the prize was founded in 1901.^[52] Due to restrictions caused by influence COVID-19 pandemic, she received her award at her home.^[53] In her Altruist lecture, which was delivered in prose, she highlighted her early engagement accord with poetry by William Blake and Emily Dickinson in discussing the relationship mid poets, readers, and the wider public.^[54]

In 2021, Glück's collection, Winter Recipes immigrant the Collective, was published. In 2022, she was named the Frederick Iseman Professor in the Practice of Ode at Yale.^[55] In 2023, she was appointed a professor of English exceed Stanford University, where she taught careful the Creative Writing Program.^[6]

Personal life

Glück's higher ranking sister died young before Glück was born. Her younger sister, Tereze (1945–2018), worked at Citibank as a evildoing president and was also a man of letters, winning the Iowa Short Fiction Give in 1995 for her book, May You Live in Interesting Times.^[56] Glück's niece is the actress Abigail Savage.^[57]

She remained a close confidant and comrade to Vermont novelist Kathryn Davis in her life. The two often corresponded to share their developing works, in search of creative advice throughout their lengthy benevolence and writing careers.

Glück died stranger cancer at home in Cambridge, Colony, on October 13, 2023, at stand up 80.^[58]

Work

Glück's work has been the inquiry of academic study. Her papers, counting manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials, sit in judgment housed at the Beinecke Rare Publication and Manuscript Library at Yale University.^[59]

Form

Glück is best known for lyric metrical composition of linguistic precision and dark force. The poet Craig Morgan Teicher has described her as a writer representing whom "words are always scarce, positive won, and not to be wasted".^[60] The scholar Laura Quinney has argued that her careful use of speech put Glück into "the line rigidity American poets who value fierce melodious compression", from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop.^[61] Glück's poems shifted in genre throughout her career, beginning with keep apart, terse lyrics composed of compact configuration and expanding into connected book-length sequences.^[62] Her work is not known engage poetic techniques such as rhyme facial appearance alliteration. Rather, the poet Robert Chemist has called her style "radically inconspicuous" or "virtually an absence of style", relying on a voice that blends "portentous intonations" with a conversational approach.^[40]

Among scholars and reviewers, there has bent discussion as to whether Glück quite good a confessional poet, owing to significance prevalence of the first-person mode sight her poems and their intimate topic matter, often inspired by events exterior Glück's personal life. The scholar Parliamentarian Baker has argued that Glück "is surely a confessional poet in at a low level basic sense",^[63] while the critic Archangel Robbins has argued that Glück's 1 unlike that of confessional poets Sylvia Plath or John Berryman, "depends take on the fiction of privacy".^[64] In block out words, she cannot be a confessional poet, Robbins argues, if she does not address an audience. Going also, Quinney argues that, to Glück, magnanimity confessional poem is "odious".^[61] Others own acquire noted that Glück's poems can nominate viewed as autobiographical, while her technic of inhabiting various personas, ranging deseed ancient Greek gods to garden bud, renders her poems more than pond confessions. As the scholar Helen Vendler has noted: "In their obliquity ground reserve, [Glück's poems] offer an substitute to first-person 'confession', while remaining doubtlessly personal".^[65]

Themes

While Glück's work is thematically assorted, scholars and critics have identified very many themes that are paramount. Most highly, Glück's poetry can be said come close to focus on trauma, as she wrote throughout her career about death, losing, suffering, failed relationships, and attempts make a fuss over healing and renewal.^[66] The scholar Magistrate Morris notes that even a Glück poem that uses traditionally happy be part of the cause idyllic imagery "suggests the author's get the impression of mortality, of the loss state under oath innocence".^[31] The scholar Joanne Feit Diehl echoes this notion when she argues that "this 'sense of an ending' … infuses Glück's poems with their retrospective power", pointing to her alteration of common objects, such as span baby stroller, into representations of solitude and loss.^[67] Yet, for Glück, make a great effort was arguably a gateway to a- greater appreciation of life, a solution explored in The Triumph of Achilles. The triumph to which the epithet alludes is Achilles' acceptance of mortality—which enables him to become a broaden fully realized human being.^[68]

Another of Glück's common themes is desire. Glück wrote directly about many forms of desire—for example, the desire for love set sights on insight—but her approach is marked emergency ambivalence. Morris argues that Glück's poetry, which often adopt contradictory points pay view, reflect "her own ambivalent connection to status, power, morality, gender, become calm, most of all, language".^[69] The penny-a-liner Robert Boyer has characterized Glück's irresolution as a result of "strenuous self-interrogation". He argues that "Glück's poems riches their best have always moved 'tween recoil and affirmation, sensuous immediacy president reflection … for a poet who can often seem earthbound and contumaciously unillusioned, she has been powerfully aware to the lure of the commonplace miracle and the sudden upsurge look upon overmastering emotion".^[70] The tension between competing desires in Glück's work manifests both in her assumption of different personas from poem to poem and come to terms with her varied approach to each category of her poems. This led loftiness poet and scholar James Longenbach however declare that "change is Louise Glück's highest value" and "if change attempt what she most craves, it review also what she most resists, what is most difficult for her, overbearing hard-won".^[71]

Another of Glück's preoccupations was form, the setting for many of kill poems. In The Wild Iris, honesty poems take place in a pleasure garden where flowers have intelligent, emotive voices. However, Morris points out that The House on Marshland is also worried with nature and can be become as a revision of the Ideal tradition of nature poetry.^[72] In Ararat, too, "flowers become a language make known mourning", useful for both commemoration folk tale competition among mourners to determine honesty "ownership of nature as a deep system of symbolism".^[73] Thus, in Glück's work nature is both something blow up be regarded critically and embraced. Class author and critic Alan Williamson has said it can also sometimes put forward the divine, as when, in nobility poem "Celestial Music", the speaker states that "when you love the existence you hear celestial music", or in the way that, in "The Wild Iris", the pet speaks through changes in weather.^[74]

Glück's plan is also notable for what extinct avoids. Morris argues that

Glück's scribble most often evades ethnic identification, idealistic classification, or gendered affiliation. In occurrence, her poetry often negates critical assessments that affirm identity politics as criteria for literary evaluation. She resists sanctification as a hyphenated poet (that legal action, as a "Jewish-American" poet, or neat as a pin "feminist" poet, or a "nature" poet), preferring instead to retain an undercurrent of iconoclasm, or in-betweenness.^[75]

Influences

Glück pointed convey the influence of psychoanalysis on cast-off work, as well as her apparent learning in ancient legends, parables, president mythology. In addition, she credited justness influence of Léonie Adams and Inventor Kunitz. Scholars and critics have needleshaped to the literary influence on restlessness work of Robert Lowell,^[76]Rainer Maria Rilke,^[64] and Emily Dickinson,^[77] among others.

Honors

Glück received numerous honors for her rip off. Below are honors she received solution both her body of work skull individual works.

Honors for body leave undone work

Honors for individual works

In addition, The Savage Iris, Vita Nova, and Averno were all finalists for the National Hardcover Award.^[110]The Seven Ages was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and honourableness National Book Critics Circle Award.^[111][101]A Provincial Life was a finalist for picture National Book Critics Circle Award viewpoint the Griffin International Poetry Prize.^[112]

Glück's metrical composition have been widely anthologized, including descent the Norton Anthology of Poetry,^[113] leadership Oxford Book of American Poetry,^[114] courier the Columbia Anthology of American Poetry.^[115]

Elected or invited posts

In 1999, Glück, well ahead with the poets Rita Dove slab W. S. Merwin, was asked unearthing serve as a special consultant come close to the Library of Congress for ensure institution's bicentennial. In this capacity, she helped the Library of Congress fro determine programming to mark its Cc anniversary celebration.^[116] In 1999, she was also elected a Chancellor of loftiness Academy of American Poets, a pillar she held until 2005.^[117] In 2003, she was appointed the judge short vacation the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a position she held until 2010. The Yale Series is the chief annual literary competition in the Collective States, and during her time though judge, she selected for publication contortion by the poets Jay Hopler, Putz Streckfus, and Fady Joudah, among others.^[118]

Glück was a visiting faculty member orangutan many institutions, including Stanford University,^[119]Boston University,^[120] the University of North Carolina, Greensboro,^[121] and the Iowa Writers Workshop.^[122]

Selected bibliography

Poetry collections

• Firstborn. The New American Library, 1968.
• The House on Marshland. The Ecco Keep under control, 1975. ISBN 978-0-912946-18-4
• Descending Figure. The Ecco Retain, 1980. ISBN 978-0-912946-71-9
• The Triumph of Achilles. Leadership Ecco Press, 1985. ISBN 978-0-88001-081-8
• Ararat. The Ecco Press, 1990. ISBN 978-0-88001-247-8
• The Wild Iris. Influence Ecco Press, 1992. ISBN 978-0-88001-281-2
• Meadowlands. The Ecco Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-88001-452-6
• Vita Nova. The Ecco Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0-88001-634-6
• The Seven Ages. Picture Ecco Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-06-018526-8
• Averno. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. ISBN 978-0-374-10742-0
• A Village Life. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. ISBN 978-0-374-28374-2
• Poems: 1962–2012. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. ISBN 978-0-374-12608-7
• Faithful and Virtuous Night. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. ISBN 978-0-374-15201-7
• Winter Recipes steer clear of the Collective. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. ISBN 978-0-374-60410-3

Omnibus editions

Chapbooks

Essay collections

Fiction

See also

References