Brief biography

Louise Elisabeth Glück was born in 1943 in New York, into a family of Hungarian Jewish descent. Childhood memories and family relationships feature prominently in her work. As a young woman, Glück was formally educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, studying poetry first with Leonie Adams and then with Stanley Kunitz.

Her first book, Firstborn, was published in 1968. Confessional in content, fragmented in tone, and strongly influenced by Sylvia Plath, it was different from anything that she subsequently wrote. Reacting against the style of this collection, Glück then began to train herself to write 'poems as single sentences', and she developed a calmer and more aesthetic tone that resulted in the lyricism of The House on Marshland (1975). Her work remained strongly autobiographical but no longer nakedly so, as she employed myths and mythic language to give a universal quality to personal experience.

Descending Figure (1980) and The Triumph of Achilles (1985) continued Glück's experiments with myth, developing a more vigorous style, while Ararat (1990), a family portrait centered on her father's death, marked a newer colloquial tone. The latter collection also showed Glück's growing affinity for the book-length sequence as a poetic form.

Perhaps her finest sequence to date is The Wild Iris (1992), a meditation on life, death and God arranged according to the growing seasons of a garden. It won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993. The more openly ambitious but less successful Meadowlands (1996) was another book-length sequence that wove the story of a contemporary failed marriage with the classical myth of Odysseus; Vita Nova (1999) formed a more lyrical, thematic follow-up to this. Glück's most recent full-length collection is The Seven Ages (2001).

Louise Glück currently lives in Cambridge, MA, and teaches at Williams College. She has been twice married and is now divorced, with one son. As well as the Pulitzer, her honours include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the New Yorker Readers Award. She served as US Poet Laureate in 2003-2004.

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