Meaning of Nobel Literature To Ms Louise Glück

Meaning of Nobel Literature Award to Ms Louise Glück

Louise Glück has become the first American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature in past 27 years. Louise has always been lauded for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal. 

She is the 16th woman to win the Nobel, and the first American woman since Toni Morrison took the prize in 1993. American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was definitely a surprise winner in 2016.

Seventy Seven year-old Louise Glück received the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetry The Wild Iris in 1993. The book also received the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award. Publishers Weekly called it "ambitious and original" and praised its "powerful, muted strangeness.". 

She has tackled themes including childhood and family life, often reworking Greek and Roman myths.

Glück was born in the city of New York in 1943. She grew up on Long Island and attended Columbia University. She is an adjunct professor of English at Yale. She always advocated for the balance between life and work, as the work will come out of an authentic life. 

I give below two of her favorite poems to give you an idea of what she writes : 

At the end of my suffering 

there was a door. 

Hear me out: that which you call death 

I remember. 

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. 

Then nothing. The weak sun 

flickered over the dry surface. 

It is terrible to survive 

as consciousness 

buried in the dark earth. 

Then it was over: that which you fear, being 

a soul and unable 

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth 

bending a little. And what I took to be 

birds darting in low shrubs. 

You who do not remember 

passage from the other world 

I tell you I could speak again: whatever 

returns from oblivion returns 

to find a voice: 

from the center of my life came 

a great fountain, deep blue 

shadows on azure seawater.

Another poem of Gluck : All hollow 

Even now this landscape is assembling. 

The hills darken. The oxen 

Sleep in their blue yoke, 

The fields having been 

Picked clean, the sheaves 

Bound evenly and piled at the roadside 

Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises: 

This is the barrenness 

Of harvest or pestilence 

And the wife leaning out the window 

With her hand extended, as in payment, 

And the seeds 

Distinct, gold, calling 

Come here 

Come here, little one 

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

 Glück is not a cheerleader. She’s in no way a voice for any cause – she is a human being engaged in the language and in the world. And I think there’s this wonderful sense that she is not polemical, and maybe this is what’s being celebrated. She’s not a person trying to persuade us of anything, but helping us to explore the world we’re living in.