Louise Glück Biography


(Masterpieces of American Literature)
ph_0111226236-Gluck.jpg Louise Glück Published by Salem Press, Inc.

Born in New York City on April 22, 1943, Louise Glück is the daughter of Daniel and Beatrice Glück. Their first daughter died before Louise was born, an event that would affect the poet profoundly and has influenced the themes of loss and grief in her works. Another daughter was born after Louise’s birth.

Glück had a solid knowledge of the Greek myths by the age of three. Her father, who wanted to be a writer but eventually decided to go into business with his brother-in-law, and her mother, who admired creative gifts and appreciated the arts, encouraged Glück and her sister to develop any inclinations or talents they had in such areas.

As an adolescent Glück developed anorexia nervosa, a condition she has described as a manifestation of the ravenous need for control and an independent self as well as a hunger for praise. Her anorexia eventually became so severe that she withdrew from high school in her last year to begin psychoanalytic sessions, which would last seven years.

Having graduated from Long Island’s Hewlett High School in 1961 and attended Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, in 1962, Glück studied at Columbia University during 1963-1966 and 1967-1968. She enrolled in a poetry workshop where poet and teacher Stanley Kunitz significantly influenced her. In 1966 Glück won the Academy of American Poets Prize, and in 1967, the same year that she married Charles Hertz, Jr., a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. In 1968 Glück’s first book, Firstborn, was published, followed by her receipt of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1969.

In 1970, Glück was a visiting teacher at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. This was followed by a...

(The entire section is 716 words.)

Louise Glück Biography

(Masterpieces of American Literature)

Known for her precision of language in declarative sentences rather than description, Glück has shown that poetry need not have its own vocabulary to be poetry. Her poems are not designed to call attention to words but to images, statements, and questions about the motivations of humans and why they keep performing certain rituals, no matter what the potential loss, perhaps because that is what makes them human. Through continual experimentation and practice of her craft, Glück has achieved a transparence in her poetry that lets the truth shine through.

Louise Glück Biography

(Poets and Poetry in America)

Louise Elisabeth Glück was born on April 22, 1943, in New York City, to a Wellesley-educated mother and a father who was a first-generation American businessman of Hungarian descent. The firstborn daughter of this family, who died before Glück’s birth, is the acknowledged source of the poet’s preoccupation with death, grieving, and loss, which are frequent themes in her work. As a teenager, Glück struggled with anorexia nervosa, another experience that later was a theme in her poetry. She later worked with poet Stanley Kunitz, who became a major influence on her life as a poet. Glück attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and Columbia University in New York City. She married Charles Hertz, Jr., in 1967, and they had one child, Noah Benjamin. Hertz and Glück later divorced, and she married John Dranow in 1977, a writer and vice president of the New England Culinary Institute.

Since 1970, she has taught at numerous colleges and universities. Although Glück has indicated that she was somewhat hesitant about teaching, she later embraced it as a means of surviving the extended silences she endured when it seemed impossible to write poetry. She has served as a poetry panelist or poetry reader at conferences and foundations, including Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and PEN Southwest Conference; she has also judged numerous poetry contests such as the Discovery Contest. Glück began a long-time association with Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1983, when she served as Scott Professor of Poetry. She joined the college faculty in the fall of 1984 and later was named Preston S. Parish ’41 Third Century Lecturer in English (1998-2004). In the fall of 2004, she became adjunct professor of English and Rosenkranz Writer in Residence at Yale University.

Louise Glück Biography

(Great Authors of World Literature, Critical Edition)

Louise Elisabeth Glück (glihk) is an American poet whose first book, published when she was only twenty-five, foreshadowed a career that has earned many of the most prestigious national grants and awards. Daughter of Beatrice and Daniel Glück, an executive, she attended Sarah Lawrence College in 1962 and Columbia University from 1963 to 1965. She has been married and divorced twice, first to Charles Hertz, Jr., with whom she had a son, and then to John Dranow, a prose writer and teacher.

Before her first book came out, she had won Columbia University’s Academy of American Poets Prize. She has since been awarded many prizes and fellowships, including National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim grants and fellowships; among her many awards, The Triumph of Achilles won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, The Wild Iris won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and she was awarded the Böllingen Prize by Yale University in 2001. She has been much in demand as a teacher and poet-in-residence at universities such as University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Columbia; University of California at Davis, Los Angeles, and Berkeley; Harvard; Brandeis; Williams College; Goddard College; and many others.

Firstborn, Glück’s initial collection of poetry, included lyrics that had appeared in national magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Poetry. Critics praised her lyric gifts, particularly her infallible ear for language. Although the book contains one sonnet, most of her patterns are free and shifting. Scattered internal rhymes throughout a poem and poems ending with a rhymed couplet are hallmarks of her style. Yet for all her early technical brilliance, the world depicted in Firstborn is brutal and maimed, and the overall voice is angry and thwarted. Some critics associated the collection with the predominant mood of the United States in 1968, which was embroiled in a controversial war in Southeast Asia and attempting to recover from political assassinations at home. Yet the book is more personal than political, with overtones of the confessional style that gained popularity in the 1950’s.

Glück did not publish another collection for seven years. The...

(The entire section is 934 words.)

Louise Glück Biography

(Poetry for Students)

Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943 to well-educated and well-to-do parents. Her mother attended Wellesley College, and her...

(The entire section is 411 words.)