Having won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for The Wild Iris, she went on to win the prestigious National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night 21 years later, before being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020: American poet Louise Glück died of cancer on Friday, October 13, in Cambridge (Massachusetts). She was 80 years old.
Apart from a few sporadic translations in magazines, Louise Glück was virtually unknown in France before her crowning achievement in Stockholm. Nevertheless, she is a major voice in American poetry, celebrated throughout the English-speaking world. On Saturday, October 14, at the 40th Les Ecritures Croisées festival in Aix-en-Provence (southern France), South African writer J. M. Coetzee – the festival's guest of honor – told Le Monde of his long-standing interest in her work. "I discovered Louise Glück through a photo. It was in a publication called The New American Poets from the 1960s. At the time, all the young American poets looked like hippies, but she, by contrast, seemed classic, reserved. For each author, there were a few lines. I read Glück's and have always followed her since. What struck me was the way in which her poetry went its own way, outside of trends. Unlike her contemporaries, who liked to flaunt their difficulties as poets, hers formed the foundations of her work, without ever being apparent in her art."
Stay the course, simply. This was the motto of this poet, born in New York on April 22, 1943, into a family of Hungarian origins. Little is known about her youth. Taken together, the few descriptions she did give us an idea of her personality, as well as her precocious passion for literature. At the age of five, this shy little girl was able to recite a poem by William Blake by heart. Then it was Shakespeare who enchanted her: she couldn't get enough of the song from Cymbeline. In her teens, she devoured Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), one of her great influences. At the age of 25, after studying at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York, she published the aptly named Firstborn, her first collection.
Glück was undoubtedly influenced by Dickinson. But she insisted she belonged to no group. She didn't identify with any particular tradition. "I admire Stevens and Dickinson," she explained to Po&sie magazine in 1985. "But I feel other proximities, other debts: Eliot, Williams, Pounds, Oppen, Cavafy, etc." She also cited Rilke and Sylvia Plath. In English, her output is substantial: a dozen collections and two essays on poetic creation, including Proofs and Theories (Ecco, 1994). In it, Glück underlines her fondness for moving forms and praises the "malleable," the "unfinished." A further difficulty for those wishing to assign her a precise poetic genre.
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