GLÜCK, Louise

Born 22 April 1943, New York, New York

Daughter of Daniel and Beatrice Grosby Glück; married John Dranow, 1977 (divorced); children: Noah

Louise Glück's parents lost their first child, a daughter, seven days after her birth. This loss irrevocably altered the family that might have been, and in her poetry Glück examines the intimate dramas of family life as loss reverberates across generational lines. She treats private pain with relentless, lyrical intensity, yet maintains a paradoxical reticence. In Glück's work, confessional poetry meets restrained classicism; her poems are tragic in a traditional sense, yet imbued with the psychological awareness of Freud and Jung.

During the years she might have been at college, she undertook psychoanalysis. She attended Sarah Lawrence College for six weeks and later took courses, almost entirely poetry workshops, at Columbia University's School of General Studies. She worked with Léonie Adams, Stanley Kunitz, and briefly with Adrienne Rich.

Glück is one of the foremost American lyric poets. She has taught in a variety of institutions, including Goddard College, the universities of North Carolina, Virginia, Iowa, Cincinnati, and California (Berkeley, Davis, and Los Angeles), Columbia University, and Williams College. She has received grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Glück's work has been recognized with many awards and prizes, including the Poetry Magazine Eunice Tietjens Prize, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature, the National Book Critics Circle award, the Boston Globe Literary Press award for poetry, and the Poetry Society of America Melville Kane award.

Firstborn, published in 1968, bears the imprint of the confessional sensibility, and Glück assumes the stance of the embittered outsider. She uses short, trenchant sentences, rhyme and off-rhyme, and colloquial diction, much like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. In her late twenties, Glück wrote nothing for over a year. In the poems that follow this silence she abandons her more formal approach with its implied harmony and its authorial virtuosity. The hot drama of the confessional style yields to increasing control and plainness of speech. Calvin Bedient says of The House on Marshland (1975): "Its ornament proved chastely limited; besides, the figurative…simply and hallucinatingly asserted itself as the real." The poems, authoritative, beautiful, and reticent, resemble folktale and myth. In "The School Children," the mothers must offer their children to the schools, like propitiatory apples, and are helpless to keep them from hurt: "And the teachers shall instruct them in silence / and the mothers shall scour the orchards for a way out, / drawing to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees / bearing so little ammunition."

In Descending Figure (1980) and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), she draws heavily on what Helen Vendler calls an "eclectic mythology" to elucidate private matters. In Ararat (1990), a series of lyrics that composes a balanced narrative about the death of her father, bereavement, and the surviving family, the mythic references are less explicit, but the resonances remain. Her family of origin appears as the archetypical family over which looms an ancient, unalterable tragedy. In Wild Iris (1992), which won the Pultizer Prize for Poetry, Glück explores questions of faith and the place of the human in the natural order through a series of meditative poems in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and George Herbert. Framed by the diurnal and seasonal cycles, the book locates itself in Glück's own garden, where everything has a voice. Characteristically, these voices are not gentle but tough and demanding.

"Poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response," wrote Glück in the introduction to The Best American Poetry (1993). Her poetry represents a quest for the self in its relation to domestic and natural life, and emotional and spiritual perception. Metaphor and myth authenticate the loss and transgression that are her poetic resources while they also replicate the predicament of paradox inherent in human knowledge. Her language is stark and inward yet lyrical. As Allen Hoey noted, she is "a devoted lyricist in the tradition of Hopkins and Donne." Her questions are pragmatic and secular, essential to survival, yet ultimately unanswerable.

In a description of "the religious mind," in Glück's essay on T. S. Eliot (1994), she reveals the transformative power of her own poetry: "Its hunger for meaning and disposition to awe, its craving for the path, the continuum." Glück's poems explore this space between the material and spiritual realms. Unlike Eliot's tendency to ultimate beliefs, Glück's impulse is toward the paradox at the center of her poetic seeking: the continuing cycle of loss and the search for meaning without end. She writes, in Hoey's view, "to know the world, to get closer to the mystery."

The poems in Meadowlands (1996) replay the decline of a contemporary marriage in juxtaposition with the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope. These figures, with Telemachus, take on the characteristics of a family's struggle to come to terms with conflict and betrayal and the needs of the self versus the needs of relationship: husband/wife, father/son, and mother/son.

Vita Nova (1999) explores the loss of love and relationship in that time and space beyond the waiting, longing, and hope represented in Meadowlands. Dido and Aeneas, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Odysseus and Penelope represent the finality of one kind of relationship and the subsequent confrontation with the self alone. The season is spring. The poet in the first poem, "Vita Nova," remembers the sounds she heard as a child: "Laughter for no cause, simply because the world is / beautiful." Later these sounds seem out of reach, perhaps lost: "Crucial / sounds or gestures like / a track laid down before the larger themes / and then unused, buried," until one morning she wakes "elated, at my age / hungry for life, utterly confident." The last poem, also titled "Vita Nova," describes "the splitting up dream" figured by the dog named Blizzard who symbolizes the breach when a relationship ends. She addresses the dog: "O Blizzard, / be a brave dog—this is / all material; you'll wake up / in a different world. / you will eat again, you will grow into a poet."

Glück's recent honors for Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994) include the 1995 PEN/Martha Albrand award for first nonfiction and honorary Doctors of Letters from Middlebury College (1996), Skidmore College (1995) and Williams College (1993). In July 1998 she became the Preston S. Parish lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Other Works:

The Garden (chapbook, 1976). The First Four Books of Poems (1995).

Bibliography:

Brown, M. L., The Love of Form is a Love of Endings: Poetic Hunger and the Aesthetic Body in Louise Glück (dissertation, 1997). Dodd, E., Reticence and the Lyric: The Development of a Personal Classicism among Four Women Poets of the Twentieth Century (dissertation, 1990). Vendler, H., Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (1980). Williamson, A., Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (1984).

Reference works:

CA (1978). CLC (1977, 1982, 1989). Contemporary Poets (1970, 1975, 1980, 1991). DLB (1980). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995). World Authors (1970).

Other references:

APR (Jan.-Feb. 1997). Beall Poetry Festival, Baylor University Department of English: Online, 1999.Bulletin of Bibliography (Dec. 1987). Contemporary Literature (Spring 1990). Hollins Critic (Oct. 1982). Literary Review (Spring 1988). Mid-American Review (1994). Midwest Quarterly: American Journal of Contemporary Thought (Summer 1983). NR (17 June 1978). NYTBR (22 Dec. 1985, 2 Sept. 1990). Parnassus: Poetry in Review (Spring-Summer 1981). Sewanee Review (Spring 1976).

—NORA MITCHELL,

UPDATED BY KAREN J. MCLENNAN