When, in 2020, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, it was a surprise, since an American poet had not been distinguished – if we discount Bob Dylan – since, in 1948, the laureate was T.S. Elliot. Louise Glück has died at the age of 80, her editor, Jonathan Galassi, of Farrar, Straus, reported this Friday.
Influenced by Shakespeare, classical mythology and Eliot himself, her texts, often brief and sprinkled with humor, make up a poetics of the everyday (which she blends with the mythical) with themes such as family relationships, loneliness, divorce (she was married twice), problems with children or the death of loved ones. Her aesthetic line moves in a containment that allowed her to express very complex emotions, often enormously painful, in a plain, analytical and serious way. With apparent simplicity, she linked with North American tradition (Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, Eliot...) and made the reader feel that her private experiences mattered to everyone. Her prose poems are polyphonic. The Nobel jury argued that “her unmistakable voice, with an austere beauty, makes individual existence universal.”
Born in a suburb of Long Island, the granddaughter of Hungarian Jews, her father patented, among other objects, the X-Acto precision knife and read Greek classics to her before putting her to bed. One of her sisters died before she was born, which she remembered in some of her works. She suffered from anorexia when she was young (an experience collected in Dedication to Hunger) and relied on psychoanalysis to overcome her problems. Author of more than a dozen collections of poems, as well as essays and a fable, she suffered long periods of creative blockage and her books include The Triumph of Achilles (1985), Ararat (1990), The Wild Iris (1992) and A Life of pueblo (2009), where he exalts a simple, natural life, claiming peace in small communities. In Averno (2006) she adapted a work by Pushkin. Her Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014) is dedicated to her family. A good part of her essays are collected in the volume Tests and Theories.
“It is so obvious to me that writing poetry is the most miraculous thing you can do that I have to remind myself that not everyone in the world wants to be a poet,” she said in an interview. A lot of people aren't even remotely interested in poetry, but it's so clear to me that, of course, it's what I want to do..."
“Everyone who writes – he added – draws on his first memories and the things that changed him, excited him or moved him in his childhood. My visionary parents read Greek myths to me, and when I could read on my own, I continued reading them. The figures of gods and heroes seemed more vivid to me than to other children in the Long Island neighborhood. It was not as if I resorted to something acquired late to give my work a kind of learning veneer. They were my bedside stories. And certain stories especially resonated with me, especially Persephone, which I have written about on and off for 50 years. And I think I was as caught up in a struggle with my mother, as ambitious girls often are. I think that particular myth gave a new aspect to those struggles. I don't want to say that it was useful in my daily life. When I wrote, instead of complaining about my mother, I could complain about Demeter.”
A university professor with a reputation for being demanding, she won all the important awards in the US, from the Pulitzer to the National Book Award or the national Humanities medal awarded to her in 2016 by President Barack Obama. Likewise, she was the poet laureate of her country during the years 2003 and 2004.
The pandemic affected her, as she recently acknowledged: “I write very erratically, it is not a constant discipline. I had been working on a book that tormented me for about four years, Community Winter Recipes. Suddenly, at the end of July and August, I unexpectedly wrote some new poems, and I suddenly saw how I could shape this manuscript and finish it. It was a miracle. The usual feelings of euphoria and relief were compromised by Covid, because I had to fight against my daily terror and the necessary limitations of my daily life.”
“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if sharp enough, can last,” she wrote, knowing that one day it would happen to her. “Beauty dies: it is the source of creation,” he noted in Ararat.
