Louise Glück
Louise Glück was an American poet and essayist born in New York City on April 22, 1943.
She attended George W. Hewlett High School before going on to study at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Writing in English, she served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004. She died in Cambridge on October 13, 2023.
The awards Glück received over the course of her career were among the most significant in American and international letters. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, and the National Humanities Medal. In 2020 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her notable works include The Wild Iris, Meadowlands, Averno, and Faithful and Virtuous Night.
Glück worked across poetry and the essay form throughout her life, and her output spanned several decades. The four notable titles — The Wild Iris, Meadowlands, Averno, and Faithful and Virtuous Night — represent a body of work that earned her recognition at every level of American and international literary distinction.
Quotes by Louise Glück
Louise Glück's insights on:
Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond – surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves. I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.
He takes her in his arms He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you But he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end You’re dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.
Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the lived – what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
17. The self ended and the world began. They were of equal size, commensurate, one mirrored the other. 18. The riddle was: why couldn’t we live in the mind. The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.
Like a child, the earth’s going to sleep, or so the story goes. But I’m not tired, it says. And the mother says, You may not be tired but I’m tired.
I caution you as I was never cautioned: You will never let go, you will never be satiated. You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger. Your body will age, you will continue to need. You will want the earth, then more of the earth-- Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond. It is encompassing, it will not minister. Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you. It will not keep you alive.
It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away.