Louise Glück Is Awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature

Born in New York Metropolis in 1943, Glück grew up on Lengthy Island, and was drawn to studying poetry and writing poetry as a baby. She wrote a few of her earliest verses when she was 5, and set her thoughts to changing into a poet when she was in her early teenagers. She struggled with anorexia as a youngster, a illness she later attributed to her obsession with purity and reaching management, and virtually starved herself to demise earlier than ultimately recovering by remedy.

She started taking poetry workshops round that point, and attended Sarah Lawrence Faculty and later Columbia College, the place she studied with the poet Stanley Kunitz. She supported herself by working as a secretary in order that she might write on the facet. In 1968, she printed her first assortment, “Firstborn.” Whereas her debut was effectively acquired by critics, she wrestled with writers’ block afterward and took a educating place at Goddard Faculty in Vermont. Working with college students impressed her to begin writing once more, and she or he went on to publish a dozen volumes of poetry.

In a lot of her work, Glück attracts inspiration from classical mythological figures. In her 1996 assortment, “Meadowlands,” she weaves collectively the figures of Odysseus and Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey with the story of the dissolution of a modern-day marriage. In her 2006 assortment, “Averno,” she used the parable of Persephone as a lens to mother-daughter relationships, struggling, getting older and demise.

Glück’s verses typically mirror her preoccupation with darkish themes — isolation, betrayal, fractured household and marital relationships, demise. However her spare, distilled language, and her frequent recourse to acquainted mythological figures, offers her poetry a common and timeless really feel, mentioned the critic and author Daniel Mendelsohn, the editor at giant for The New York Evaluate of Books.

“While you learn her poems about these troublesome issues, you are feeling cleansed somewhat than depressed,” he mentioned. “This is without doubt one of the purest poetic sensibilities in world literature proper now. It’s a sort of absolute poetry, poetry with no gimmicks, no pandering to fads or developments. It has the standard of one thing standing virtually as exterior of time.”