Louise Glück Biography

Poet. Born April 22, 1943, in New York, New York. Louise Glück (surname pronounced Glick) creates verse that has been described as technically precise, sensitive, insightful, and gripping. In her work, Glück freely shares her most intimate thoughts on such commonly shared human experiences as love, family, relationships, and death. "Glück demands a reader's attention and commands his respect," states R. D. Spector in the Saturday Review. "Glück's poetry is intimate, familial, and what Edwin Muir has called the fable, the archetypal," adds Contemporary Women Poets contributor James K. Robinson. Within her work can be discerned the influences of poets Stanley Kunitz, with whom Glück studied while attending Columbia University in the mid-1960s, and the early work of Robert Lowell; shadows cast by the confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton also haunt her earliest poetry.

From her first book of poetry, Firstborn, through her more mature work, Glück has become internationally recognized as a very skilled, yet perceptive author who pulls the reader into her poetry and shares the poetic experience equally with her audience. Helen Vendler comments in her New Republic review of Glück's second book, 1975's The House on Marshland, that "Glück's cryptic narratives invite our participation: we must, according to the case, fill out the story, substitute ourselves for the fictive personages, invent a scenario from which the speaker can utter her lines, decode the import, 'solve' the allegory. Or such is our first impulse. Later, I think, . . . we read the poem, instead, as a truth complete within its own terms, reflecting some one of the innumerable configurations into which experience falls."

For admirers of Glück's work, the poetry in books such as, The House on Marshland, The Garden, Descending Figure, The Triumph of Achilles, Ararat, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris take readers on an inner journey by exploring their deepest, most intimate feelings. "Glück has a gift for getting the reader to imagine with her, drawing on the power of her audience to be amazed," observes Anna Wooten in the American Poetry Review.

One reason reviewers cite for Glück's seemingly unfailing ability to capture her reader's attention is her expertise at creating poetry that many people can understand, relate to, and experience intensely and completely. Her poetic voice is uniquely distinctive and her language is deceptively straightforward. In her review of Glück's The Triumph of Achilles Wendy Lesser notes in the Washington Post Book World: "'Direct' is the operative word here: Glück's language is staunchly straightforward, remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech. Yet her careful selection for rhythm and repetition, and the specificity of even her idiomatically vague phrases, give her poems a weight that is far from colloquial." Lesser goes on to remark that "the strength of that voice derives in large part from its self- centeredness--literally, for the words in Glück's poems seem to come directly from the center of herself."