Loss, trauma, suffering, and pain have been the predominant themes in the news of late, particularly in the Middle East, where the world witnessed a massacre of unfathomable barbarity on Oct. 7. And now, with a full-scale war looming, further tragedies and loss of life appear to be inevitable. It is thus tragically poignant that this week the world also lost one of its most affecting voices of trauma and loss, the American Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück.
Born on April 22, 1943, in New York City and raised on Long Island, Louise Elisabeth Glück was the daughter of a poet manqué-turned-businessman and a Wellesley College-educated housewife who nourished Glück’s literary interests from a young age. After battling anorexia in her adolescence and having received psychiatric treatment for her illness, Glück stayed close to home after high school, taking courses at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester and Columbia University in Manhattan without enrolling in either school as a full-time student. In 1968, she began to publish her poetry in literary journals. Her status as a major new American poet was confirmed when she had a poem accepted in the New Yorker shortly thereafter.
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As a poet who dealt with mental illness in her life and reflected on it in her poetry, Glück often conjured another northeastern American poet, Sylvia Plath, who also meditated on loneliness, death, and physical and mental fallibility with an emotional heft and an alluring style. Glück’s flair for conveying weighty subject matter with psychological sensitivity and metric precision would help her win the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 1985 collection, The Triumph of Achilles. It, like much of her writing, was inspired by the classics, Greek mythology, and other foundational works of Western literature. One of these fonts of inspiration was Dante, from whom she took the title of her 1999 work, Vita Nova. Like a prophet laboring frantically to transcribe one of their visions before it disappears, she stated that the book “was written very, very rapidly. … Once it started, I thought, this is a roll, and if it means you’re not going to sleep, OK, you’re not going to sleep.” As if to compensate for this sleeplessness, her poetry is suffused with trancelike imagery and the kind of mythological symbols and archetypes that Jungians believe we encounter in our dreams.
After having been named the 12th U.S. poet laureate in 2003, Glück settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and maintained a post as a writer-in-residence at Yale. Having won nearly every conceivable literary award, from the Pulitzer Prize to the National Humanities Medal to the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Glück, in October 2020, was presented with the ultimate recognition for her poetry when she received a call from Sweden informing her that she had been named that year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature. In the words of the Nobel Prize committee, Glück was awarded the prize on account of “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Prior to Glück, the last American poet to have won the Nobel Prize was T.S. Eliot, in 1948, one of Glück’s primary poetic paragons, along with Emily Dickinson. But Eliot was American in a nominal sense only. He had expatriated to England at age 25, renounced his American citizenship, and assimilated himself fully into British civic and literary life, never living in the United States again after 1914. Although Glück was profoundly influenced by English poetry, she chose to remain in America, living, ironically, in the city from where Eliot had chosen to forsake his country.
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In a very real way, Glück can be said to be the only true American poet to have ever won the Nobel Prize in literature — a remarkable distinction for a country that has produced Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, and E.E. Cummings, among many others. This might, of course, be saying something about the Nobel Prize committee. But it might equally be saying something about Glück and the noteworthy place in American letters that she rightly earned through a singular kind of poetry that gave readers an empathetic, consoling literary shoulder to lean on as they sought to weather the traumas and tragedies that are an inexorable feature of human existence.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published this summer by the University of Alabama Press.
