The Louise Glück phenomenon
This year's prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the inimitable US poet, Louise Glück. A typical New Yorker, who now resides in Massachusetts and is a professor of English at Yale, Glück is the 16th woman to earn a Nobel Prize since its bestowment started in 1901. Glück has an uncanny knack for winning awards and prizes. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and bagged the 2001 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award in 2008 and the National Book Award in 2014. She was appointed the US Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004, and has authored 12 books of poetry including Firstborn (1968), The House on Marshland (1975), Vita Nova (1999) and Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014).
Precise, lyrical, ascetic and linguistically appealing, Glück’s poems characteristically contain less words and more meanings. Crafting such poems require splendid craftsmanship and the ability to compress complex thoughts into simple but highly evocative chains of words. Helen Vendler, the eminent American literary critic, captured the crux of Glück’s poetic genius in a review when she averred 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.” This invitation to participate in her arduous poetic sojourns flows from the fact that Glück’s voice emanates from her inner self and penetrates the inner self of her readers.
Poetry is the manifestation of unanticipated bursts of imagination, which are often stratified: they are wrapped in an exquisite lyrical order the human mind can magically create within itself. Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote: “there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them.” Poetry, being the internal adjustment of sounds or motions, is a subtle and sublime medium through which the subconscious of a poet interacts with his or her conscious. To be impactful, poetry must connect with life, its serendipity, complexity, vicissitudes and fragility. In the hands of masters like Glück, life becomes not only the main character of the eternal drama of existence, dejection, resentment and annihilation, but also the stage on which that drama is being played!
Glück deals with individual existence in a manner that becomes universal, collective and all-embracing. She is neither tempestuously surreal like Edgar Allan Poe nor serenely realistic like Robert Frost. However, the influence of Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Baudelaire can be discerned in her works. She has a unique talent for comprehending life and its various facets and transferring that understanding to the ordinary reader with aplomb. Whilst she focuses on relatively commonplace themes like existence, marriage, childhood, family life, joy, trauma, death and bereavement, her treatment of these subjects is astonishingly novel and titillatingly innovative.
Despite the sober simplicity and technical finesse of her language, she frequently uses characters from Greek and Roman mythology to poetically embellish her works. She has spoken through Persephone, Eurydice, and Hades, turning her poetry into a pleasurable paradox: uncomplicated and straightforward but highly abstract and intangible!
Verging on the uncouth, the contemporary literary milieu thrives on unsophisticated colloquialism and rabid slang. In such an environment, Glück’s refined linguistic peculiarity is a source of great joy. Her poetry is indeed an epoch-making phenomenon.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 24th, 2020.
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