On Oct. 8, this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature announced its winner: Louise Glück, an American poet. It just so happens that we are learning poetry in my AP Literature class, but surprisingly, no one in the group chat claimed to have heard this name before. Many students may not be familiar with her, so…who is Louise Glück?
Louise Glück is not particularly topical, nor internationally influential, so many literary writers and scholars took her Nobel Prize as a surprise. However, readers who follow American poetry closely may have noticed her at an earlier time and fell in love with her over a lifetime of serious, often introspective, terse, unsettling and sometimes exhilarating work.
In one of her most famous collections, “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” many consider her use of line breaks as positively masterful. It is common for poets to either leave harsh line breaks or overuse them in a way that feels so sloppy and disturbed, but readers comment on how Glück’s line breaks perfectly cuts images and moments, forcing the reader to pause just at the right moment. Here is one of the line breaks in the opening of “Midnight”:
“At last the night surrounded me;
I floated on it, perhaps in it,
or it carried me as a river carries
a boat, and at the same time
it swirled above me,
star-studded but dark nevertheless.
These were the moments I lived for.”
She lifts the reader up on a pillow of description and then anchors it all down with a single jolting line that brings the reader back to reality. And this little passage also contains an excellent line break between “a river carries” and “a boat,” which allows the reader to be caught up in this floating, carrying feeling of the river and then be brought into a more realistic image by being asked to picture a boat, almost separated from the concept of the river.
However, it’s not only her writing techniques that anointed her the Nobel Prize.
The Nobel committee’s citation reads: “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” The word “austere” was used so many times when thinking about her poems. In other words, Glück is so real.
Glück was not always that bleak like many other famous poets, but she came close in works that described many people, many difficult families, many adults’ tough choices. She’s not a poet you read to cheer yourself up. She is, however, a poet of wisdom.
In the long history of American literature, all poets come from somewhere; no poet speaks for us all. But, we can say that Glück’s plain lines and wide views address experiences common to many of us: feeling neglected, feeling too young or too old, and, sometimes, loving the life we find.
“Life is very weird, no matter how it ends, very filled with dreams.
Never will I forget your face, your frantic human eyes swollen with tears.”
Article by Emily Long of Churchill High School
Edited by Features Editor Matthew Minton
Photo courtesy of Robin Marchant via Getty Images