NEW DELHI, Oct 8 - Acclaimed American poet Louise Gluck, who draws on classical mythology, family life and nature in her precise and spare rendition of certain traumatic facets of the human condition such as pain and loss � both personal and public � but also longing and self-realisation, was on Thursday awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2020. The New York-born Gluck, 77, is the 16th woman to win the prestigious prize, and the first American to receive it since singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 2016.
The Swedish Academy cited �her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal� in selecting her for the prestigious prize. Gluck, who overcame her anorexia affliction, disrupted education and lack of academic qualification, and writer�s block to emerge an important voice in American letters, has at least 12 volumes of poetry and several collections of essays on poetry to her credit.
Her most recent published work was American Originality: Essays on Poetry (2017).
Publishing her first collection of poems Firstborn in 1968 to some positive feedback, she subsequently complained of writer�s block but said it slowly dissipated after she started teaching poetry in a Vermont college. It was her second volume The House on Marshland (1975), which brought her to prominence, and showcased �her distinctive voice�, as per American critic Daniel Morris.
Assessing her work, Nobel Committee Chairman Anders Olsson said her poetic oeuvre is �characterised by a striving for clarity�.
�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,� he wrote on the Nobel Prize�s website.
However, as Olsson, and many scholars have noted, that while Gluck draws on her own life for her work, she is not a �confessional poet�, like, say, Sylvia Plath, and her verse eschews ethnic, religious or gender categories of identity politics, or a definite classification. � IANS
