US poet Louise Glück wins Nobel Prize
American poet Louise Glück has won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her “candid and uncompromising” work.
NEWYORK » Louise Glück, an American poet long revered for the power, inventiveness and concision of her work and for her generosity to youngerwriters, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Nobel Committee on Thursday praised her as “candid and uncompromising” in granting a rare honor 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, Glück had already received virtually every honor possible for a poet, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for “The Wild Iris,” theNational BookAward in 2014for “Faithful andVirtuous 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.
Anative of NewYorkCity, descended in part from Hungarian Jews, Glück began reading poetry obsessively as a child, and by her early teens, shewas already trying to have herwork published. She struggled with anorexia as an adolescent, later saying that her eating disorderwas less an expression of despair than of her desire to free the soul from the confines of her body, a theme that later arose inher work.
The 77-year- old Glück 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, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said that “Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classicalmotifs, present inmost 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.”
Glück’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: “Howcan I rest? / How can I be content / when there is still / that odor in the world?”
Glück’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 Glück at Williams College and is now a colleague at Yale, praised her as “incredible” teacher who valued the work above all.
“I remember the rigor, the wit andthepatience that she showed me as a 19-year-old student trying to learnwhat therewas tolearnabout 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. Therewas no place for the niceties of mediocrity, no false praise. When Louise speaks you believe her because she doesn’thide inside of civility.”