Louise gluck full biography of joshua tree

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“Poet and Stanford Visiting Professor Louise Glück Wins Nobel Prize in Literature.” Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, 9 Oct. 2020, humsci.stanford.edu/feature/poet-and-stanford-visiting-professor-louise-gluck-wins-nobel-prize-literature#:~:text=U.S.%20poet%20Louise%20Gl%C3%BCck%2C%20a,beauty%20makes%20individual%20existence%20universal.%22.

“Louise Glück, Author at the American Scholar.” The American Scholar, 8 Oct.

2020, theamericanscholar.org/author/louise-gluck/

“Louise Gluck Wins Bollingen Prize in Poetry.” YaleNews, 12 Sept. While Rehak acclaimed “every poem in The Seven Ages [as] a weighty, incandescent marvel,” a Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked: “Considering age and aging, summer and fall, ‘stasis’ and constant loss, Glück’s new poems often forsake the light touch of her last few books for the grim wisdom she sought in the 1980s.”

Glück’s next book, Averno, was a critical success however and many judged it to be her finest work since The Wild Iris.

In addition to the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, she has received many awards and honors for her work, including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. The book uses the voices of Odysseus and Penelope to create “a kind of high-low rhetorical experiment in marriage studies,” according to Deborah Garrison in the New York Times Book Review. Garrison added that, through the “suburban banter” between the ancient wanderer and his wife, Meadowlands “captures the way that a marriage itself has a tone, a set of shared vocal grooves inseparable from the particular personalities involved and the partial truces they’ve made along the way.” Commenting on the link between Glück’s work and the narrative of Homer, Leslie Ullman added in Poetry that the dynamic of Meadowlands is “played out through poems that speak through or about principle characters in The Odyssey, and it is echoed in poems that do not attempt to disguise their origins in Glück’s own experience.”

Vita Nova (1999) earned Glück the prestigious Bollingen Prize from Yale University.

The poet Robert Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing,” and her poetry is noted for its technical precision, sensitivity and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death. The Bollingen Prize is an American literary honor that recognizes a poet for their best new volume of work or lifetime achievement.

Written by Rudolf Pretzler

As one of America's most lauded contemporary poets, Louise Gluck poems consists of a relatively simply vocabulary. A year prior, (1967), Glück married her first husband whom she met while at Columbia University but their relationship did not last long as they divorced. Through her unflinching honesty and deeply personal writing, Glück invites the reader to confront her own fears as well as their own.

Her writing style is sparse or even economical in her usage of language, yet she writes confrontationally about human truths.

louise gluck full biography of joshua tree

The Nobel Prize in Literature is one of the highest accolades in writing.

  • In 2020, she won  The Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world. The judges wrote, “In the work of no other contemporary American poet is the individual psyche so unsparingly portrayed, in both the anguish and the humor with which it confronts its profound solitude and the twin darknesses which precede birth and follow life… [Glück] deals with powerful emotions, expressed in a language of surpassing clarity and spareness, full of passion and devoid of sentiment.” (YaleNews, 2011)


    In 2008, she also received the Wallace Stevens Award and was rewarded $100,000 for her writing style.

    Frequently described as “spare,” James K. Robinson in Contemporary Women Poets also noted that “Glück’s poetry is intimate, familial, and what Edwin Muir has called the fable, the archetypal.” Rosanna Warren has described Glück’s “classicizing gestures”—her frequent reworking of Greek and Roman myths such as Persephone and Demeter, for example—as necessary to her lyric project.

    But she added that “later, I think…we read the poem, instead, as a truth complete within its own terms, reflecting some one of the innumerable configurations into which experience falls.”

    For admirers of Glück’s work, the poetry in books such as Firstborn, The House on Marshland, The Garden (1976), Descending Figure (1980), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), Ararat (1990), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris (1992) take readers on an inner journey by exploring their deepest, most intimate feelings.

    The near miss makes us shiver.”

    In 2003 Glück was named the twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress. "The Wild Iris’" is the title poem for her 1992 collection. Her honors include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

    The recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Glück was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999.

    What can be seen in the winning poem "Averno", the lyrical "I" is considering death by other means than dying. The Nobel committee regarded Glück for her "unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal" (Stanford).

  • In 1993 Glück won a Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris (1992)

  • In 2001 she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

  • In 2008, she received the Wallace Stevens Award and was rewarded $100,000 for her writing.

    Glück is survived by her son and two granddaughters as she sadly passed away on Friday, October 13, 2023.