Louise Glück Facts, Poems, Awards: Nobel Prize 2020 in Literature

 

Louise Glück, an American poet, essayist and professor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020  “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Louise Glück Facts

• The full name of Louise Gluck is Louise Elisabeth Glück
• She was born on April 22, 1943, in New York City
• Her father is Daniel Glück, a businessman, and mother Beatrice Glück
• As a teenager, Glück developed anorexia nervosa.
• She began psychoanalytic treatment and was taken out of school in order to focus on her rehabilitation, although she still graduated in 1961
• She married Charles Hertz, Jr., in 1967. The marriage ended in divorce in 1968
• Again she married John Dranow, an author in 1980
• She made her debut in 1968 with Firstborn, and was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature.
• Apart from her writing she is a professor of English at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Louise Glück Poems

1. Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)
2. Poems: 1962-2012 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013)
3. A Village Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009)
4. Averno (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)
5. The Seven Ages (Ecco Press, 2001)
6. Vita Nova (Ecco Press, 1999)
7. Meadowlands (Ecco Press, 1996)
8. The First Four Books of Poems (Ecco Press, 1995)
9. The Wild Iris (Ecco Press, 1992)
10. Ararat (Ecco Press, 1990)
11. The Triumph of Achilles (Ecco Press, 1985)
12. Descending Figure (Ecco Press, 1980)
13. The Garden (Antaeus, 1976)
14. The House on Marshland (Ecco Press, 1975)
15. Firstborn (New American Library, 1968)

Louise Glück Prose

1. Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (The Ecco Press, 1994)
2. American Originality: Essays on Poetry (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2017)

Theme of Louse Gluck’s Poetry

Louise Glück is an autobiographical and a confessional poet. Thematically Glück’s work is diverse. Glück’s poetry mainly focused on trauma, as she has written throughout her career about death, loss, rejection, the failure of relationships, and attempts at healing and renewal. Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her.

List of Honors Louise Glück Received

• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1970)
• Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts (1975)
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1979–80)
• American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1981)
• Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts (1987)
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1988–89)
• Honorary Doctorate, Williams College (1993)
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Elected Member (1993)
• Vermont State Poet (1994–1998)
• Honorary Doctorate, Middlebury College (1996)
• American Academy of Arts and Letters, Elected Member (1996)
• Lannan Literary Award (1999)
• School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences 50th Anniversary Medal, MIT (2001)
• Poet Laureate of the United States (2003–2004)
• American Academy of Achievement, Elected Member (2012)
• American Philosophical Society, Elected Member (2014)

List of Award List Louise Glück won

1. National Book Award in Poetry in 2014 for her Faithful and Virtuous Night
2. National Book Award in Poetry in 2006 for her Averno
3. Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize  in 1999 for  her Vita Nova
4. The New Yorker’s Book Award in Poetry in 1999
5. Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her The Wild Iris
6. The Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award (1992)
7. The Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry in 1990 for her Ararat
8. The National Book Critics Circle Award for her The Triumph of Achilles (1985)
9. The Boston Globe Literary Press Award
10. The Poetry Society of America’s Melville Kane Award
11. The PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction for her essay Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994)
12. Bollingen Prize in Poetry
13. The Lannan Literary Award for Poetry
14. Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize
15. The MIT Anniversary Medal
16. Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets (2008)
17. American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Poetry (2015)
18. Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry (2010)
19. National Humanities Medal (2015)
20. National Humanities Medal (2015)
21. Nobel Prize in Literature (2020)

Best Louise Glück Quotes

1. “Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.”
   ― Louise Glück, Descending Figure
2. “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
   ― Louise Gluck
3. “From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.”
   ― Louise Gluck
4. “Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.”
   ― Louise Glück
5. “Intense love always leads to mourning.”
   ― Louise Gluck,Triumph of Achilles