Most of what I know about poetry can be summed up in this opening line: “There once was a girl from Nantucket …”
I’m kidding, of course (kind of). But we’re talking poetry today because American poet Louise Glück was just awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature. In announcing the prize, the Nobel committee cited her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
If you read, follow and enjoy poetry, Louise Glück’s name isn’t a surprise. She is among the most awarded poets of our time, having received the National Book Critics Circle Award (for The Triumph of Achilles in 1985); the national poetry prize from the Library of Congress (in 1990, for Ararat); a National Book Award (in 2014, for Faithful and Virtuous Night); and the Pulitzer Prize (in 1992 for The Wild Iris).
And those are just the highlights. During her 50-year-plus career, Louise’s 15 books of poetry and two essay collections have received dozens of awards and been anthologized for decades. She was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004, a two-time Guggenheim Fellow, and three-time recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Louise came to poetry as the result of a battle with anorexia nervosa in her teens and early 20s that required years of therapy (specifically, psychoanalysis) to overcome. She was born in New York City in 1943 and raised on Long Island, where her father ran his own business (he and his brother invented the X-Acto Knife) and her mother, a graduate of Wellesley College, had Louise and her sister reading Greek mythology and other classic stories.
She graduated from high school in 1961, but because of her illness chose not to attend college full time. Instead, she enrolled in a poetry class at Sarah Lawrence College and then spent two years taking poetry workshops at Columbia University’s School of General Education.
In 1965 Louise left Columbia, got married, and began working as a secretary. Three years and one divorce later, she published Firstborn, her first book of poems; seven years later she produced her second collection, The House on Marshland. It’s considered to be her break-through work.
By 1980 Louise had married again, given birth to a son, and published her third poetry collection. That same year her house burned down, and along with it all of Louise’s possessions. Critics consider this a turning point in her work, with the poetry she wrote afterwards, and after her father’s death, being sharper and more visceral than her earlier poetry. The 1980s and 1990s, in fact, were her most prolific writing years.
Today, Louise teaches at Yale and continues to write. In 2012, her publisher released Poems: 1962 to 2012, a collection of over a half-century of her work that was considered a major literary event. Her latest book, American Originality: Essays on Poetry, was published in 2017.
Literary critics and scholars cite her spare use of language as a hallmark of Louise’s lyric poetry. Her themes include trauma, desire and nature, and she doesn’t shy away from exploring the deeply personal in her poems. Louise credits her ability to access deep feelings of sadness and isolation to the psychoanalysis she underwent when she was young.