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Louise Glück, an American poet and an adjunct professor of English at Yale University, was this morning awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.
She has published 12 collections of poetry and additional volumes of essays about poetry.
"All are characterized by a striving for clarity," said the Nobel announcement. "Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her. In her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self."
The Nobel committee added, "But even if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works. The voices of Dido, Persephone and Eurydice -- the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed -- are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid."
At Yale, she is also the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence.
The Poetry Foundation page on Glück said she "is noted for her poetry’s technical precision, sensitivity, and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death, as well as what poet Rosanna Warren has called its 'classicizing gestures' or frequent reworking of Greek and Roman myths such as Persephone and Demeter."
