Research Guide to American Literature

his Jewish father emigrated from Hungary and settled in New York. She is one
of three sisters, the middle between the youngest, Tereze, and the eldest, who
died before she was born and who is the subject of many of Glück’s poems. As a
teenager, Glück suffered from anorexia, an oft-discussed theme in her work. In
her senior year of high school, she began psychoanalysis which lasted for seven
years, a process that she says taught her to think and to pay close attention to
speech. She attended Sarah Lawrence College in 1962, transferring to Columbia
University where she studied with poet Stanley Kunitz (whose work she has
written about in Proofs and Theories, 1994). Her talents were recognized early on,
and in 1967 she was awarded the Columbia University Academy of American
Poets Prize; publication of her first poetry collection, Firstborn (1968), came soon
after. Since then, Glück has been recognized with fellowships from the Gug-
genheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment
for the Arts. Her awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award for The
Triumph of Achilles (1985), the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt
National Prize for Poetry for Ararat (1990), the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris
(1992), the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction for Proofs and Theories
(1994), the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (1999), and the Bollingen Prize
(2001). A former U.S. poet laureate (2003–2004), Glück serves as judge for the
Yale Series of Younger Poets (a position she has held since 2003) and teaches cre-
ative writing at Boston and Yale Universities. She has been married and divorced
twice and has one son, Noah, who was born in 1973.
Glück’s attempts to transform private experiences into broader social con-
cerns can be traced throughout her work. In her second collection, The House
on Marshland (1975), the confessional mode of Firstborn continues; but she
transforms personal into public narratives by adopting the perspectives of various
literary figures. In terms of tone, these poems are less grim. Diseased landscapes,
relationships, and self of Firstborn are replaced with Eden-like imagery and poems
about birthing. Not all is rosy, however; poems featuring autumn suggest an ever-
present awareness of death. Glück continues this theme in The Descending Figure
(1980), the title of which refers to images of falling and destruction, from dying
biblical cities such as Jerusalem to those of the sister who died at birth. Glück
followed it with The Triumph of Achilles, which marks her first extended use of
literary personae to treat traditional lyrical themes related to loss and betrayal in
love; she perfected this technique in the collections published during the 1990s.
The mythic mode seems to provide the kind of detachment encouraged by
the psychoanalytic process she underwent as a young adult. Although Glück
adopts a more personal tone in Ararat, invoking the deaths of her sister and father,
she explores feelings of grief and loss with an awareness of her lack of objectivity.
In the “Untrustworthy Speaker,” for instance, she warns, “Don’t listen to me; My
heart’s been broken. / I don’t see anything objectively... / When I speak pas-
sionately, / that’s when I’m least to be trusted.” Glück returns to an extended use
of other voices and perspectives in The Wild Iris and Meadowlands (1996). The
poems of the first collection describe a garden from early spring to the first frost
of autumn with flowers representing different aspects of human feeling but also

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