2023-10-14 10:36:09
Literature Louise Glück†
At the end of suffering, a gate
As of: 10:36 a.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Louise Glück, 1943 to 2023
Source: picture alliance/dpa/The Nobel Foundation/Nobelstiftung
In 1993 she received the Pulitzer Prize, and in the midst of the Corona pandemic she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: On the death of the intrepid American poet Louise Glück, who overcame numerous personal crises with a rigorous art.
The Nobel Prize for Literature comes in different versions. Sometimes the committee carries him like a crown into a castle whose windows are already shining brightly and whose portal is wide open, and then again it sets off on a long journey to a rather remote house in a rather remote area and, above all, pushes open a door . Bob Dylan, the penultimate American Nobel Prize winner for literature, was certainly one of the castle’s residents; in the case of Louise Glück, who received the Nobel Prize in the midst of the Corona pandemic that dampened everything, including award ceremonies, it was more about opening a door.
Glück had already received the Pulitzer Prize a quarter of a century earlier, but it was a long time ago that poets lived in castles of fame – today they are no longer as famous as TS Eliot, another American poet who was crowned by the Nobel Prize jury. “Never heard of it,” was often the motto when Louise Glück received what is still the most powerful literary prize of all in 2020 for her “unmistakable poetic voice,” and even seasoned critics first had to learn that the conspicuous umlaut in her European name was a thing in America was a silent umlaut.
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But the door to her work has actually opened a crack. While three years ago only one of her volumes of poetry was available in German (and even that was only antiquarian), there are now four, including the important collections “Wilde Iris” (originally from 1992) and “Averno” (first published in 2006). They show – despite all the modern formlessness, which is apparent in most cases – a formally strict (and generally strict) modern poet who faces the metaphysical homelessness with increasing determination and mental suffering, instead of ducking away from it, with great fearlessness explored.
A heart between the lines
Louise Glück’s poems are by no means consolatory, but they are usually confrontations with pain and often achieve the only humanly possible victory, namely to continue to feel despite everything. “Portrait” is the name of one of them, which, as is sometimes the case with happiness, tells a little story: a child paints a person, but doesn’t know what to do after just the outline until a mother figure appears and fills the space between the lines with a heart.
Louise Glück’s art has always been an art against personal crises, of which there were quite a few in her life: the death of her older sister, to which, as she long believed, she owed her own life; the anorexia that nearly took her life; two broken marriages. To cope with this, they not least made myth, especially the Greeks, and finally, most impressively, nature fertile. “At the end of my suffering,” begins “Wilde Iris,” the thoroughly programmatic title poem of the collection of the same name, “a gate was found.”
Louise Glück, who wrote 13 volumes of poetry and numerous essays and taught her poetry for a long time, succumbed to cancer on October 13, 2023 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 80 years old. “Whatever returns from oblivion,” she wrote, “returns to find a voice.”
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