American poet Louise Gluck wins Nobel for literature
NEW YORK — Louise Gluck, an American poet long revered for the power, inventiveness and concision of her work and for her generosity to younger writers, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Nobel Committee on Thursday praised her as “candid and uncompromising” in granting a rare honour for a U.S. poet, with Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Frost among her predecessors who were bypassed.
A former U.S. poet laureate, Gluck had already received virtually every honour possible for a poet, including the Pulitzer Prize in1993 for “The Wild Iris,” the National Book Award in 2014 for “Faithful and Virtuous Night” and a National Humanities Medal in 2015. She is just the 16th woman to get the Nobel for literature since it was started in 1901.
A native of New York City, descended in part from Hungarian Jews, Gluck began reading poetry obsessively as a child, and by her early teens, she was already trying to have her work published. She struggled with anorexia as an adolescent, later saying that her eating disorder was less an expression of despair than of her desire to free the soul from the confines of her body, a theme that later arose in her work.
The 77-year-old Gluck has drawn from both personal experience and common history and mythology, whether revisiting the final section of “The Iliad” in “Penelope’s Song” or the abduction of Persephone in “Persephone’s Song,” in which she imagines Persephone “lying in the bed of Hades:”
“What is in her mind?/ Is she afraid? Has something/ blotted out the idea/ of mind?”
Anders Olson, chair of the Nobel literature committee, said that “Gluck seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works. The voices of Dido, Persephone and Eurydice — the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed — are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid.”
Gluck’s poetry collections also include “Descending Figure,” “Ararat” and “The Triumph of Achilles,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle prize in 1985. It contains one of her most anthologized poems, the spare and despairing “Mock Orange,” in which a flowering shrub becomes the focus of a wider wail of anguish about sex and life: “How can I rest? / How can I be content / when there is still / that odor in the world?”
Gluck’s legacy extends beyond her own work. Currently dividing her time between Yale University and Stanford University, she has called teaching one of the few pure joys of her life and has mentored many younger poets, including Claudia Rankine, author of the acclaimed “Citizen” and a current work, “Just Us.”
Rankine, who studied under Gluck at Williams College and is now a colleague at Yale, praised her as “incredible” teacher who valued the work above all.
“I remember the rigour, the wit and the patience that she showed me as a 19-year-old student trying to learn what there was to learn about getting inside the craft of writing poetry,” Rankine told The Associated Press on Thursday. “You would hand in something and Louise would find the one line that worked. There was no place for the niceties of mediocrity, no false praise. When Louise speaks you believe her because she doesn’t hide inside of civility.”
Nobel laureates receive a more than $1.1 million (U.S.) prize and are usually feted at a banquet in December, but the event was cancelled this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. This year’s winners will be invited to attend in 2021.
The literature prize comes after several years of controversy and scandal for the organization that awards the accolade. In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which names the Nobel literature committee, and sparked a mass exodus of members.