The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2020

by Louise Glück

The complete acceptance speech of Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.The Nobel Prize committee selected poet and author Louise Glück "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." Here is the full text of her Nobel Lecture given on December 7, 2020.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Writing

14 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 15, 2020

About the author

American poet Louise Elisabeth Glück served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004.

Parents of Hungarian Jewish heritage reared her on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University.

She was the author of twelve books of poetry, including: A Village Life (2009); Averno (2006), which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; Ararat (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.

In 2001, Yale University awarded Louise Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection, The Wild Iris . Glück is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award ( Triumph of Achilles ), the Academy of American Poet's Prize ( Firstborn ), as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."

Glück also worked as a senior lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, served as a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa and taught at Goddard College in Vermont. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teached as the Rosencranz writer in residence at Yale University and in the creative writing program of Boston University.

Reviews

[Sidharth Vardhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The portrait of poetess as a child:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lit...

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Private Voice
Review of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux eBook edition (December 15, 2020)

Louise Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." As opposed to the large scale banquets of previous years' presentations, the ceremony was an intimate affair held in Louise Glück's garden on Sunday, December 6, 2020 with the honoree and presenter Swedish Consul-General Annika Rembe suitably masked and warmly clothed in the beginnings of this pandemic winter.

Glück's acceptance lecture is very humble and self-effacing. She spends most of the time talking about the poets and poems that inspired her in her young age. These are especially William Blake's "The Little Black Boy" and Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who Are You?" which are quoted and then also reproduced in full as Appendices to the talk. Glück then concludes with:

It was a surprise to me on the morning of October 8th to feel the sort of panic I have been describing. The light was too bright. The scale too vast.
Those of us who write books presumably wish to reach many. But some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.
I believe that in awarding me this prize, the Swedish Academy is choosing to honor the intimate, private voice, which public utterance can sometimes augment or extend, but never replace.

Trivia and Link
I read The Nobel Lecture for Literature, 2020 in the FSG eBook edition as downloaded on loan from the Toronto Public Library. You can also read the lecture in English or Swedish online or download it in pdf format at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lit...

[Márcio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aqueles dentre nós que escrevem livros supostamente desejam alcançar muitas pessoas. Mas para alguns poetas "alcançar muitas pessoas" não se traduz em termos espaciais, como em um auditório lotado. Esses poetas entendem "alcançar muitas pessoas" temporalmente, sequencialmente, muitas ao longo do tempo, no futuro, mas que, por alguma razão profunda, esses leitores sempre chegam individualmente, um por um.

[Fin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe that in awarding me this prize, the Swedish Academy is choosing to honor the intimate, private voice, which public utterance can sometimes augment or extend, but never replace.

A manifesto arguing for the place of the intimate voice, from one speaker to another listener, as opposed to the sometimes 'sinister' voice of the collective in poetry. Glück is not a Milton, rather a Dickinson, and this sense of a secret, intimate pact between poet and reader is key for her.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

That Blake poem she used...yikes

[John Shea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too short?? But very accurately to the point!!

Appropriately, this was very much to the point on her/our purpose in poetry, art and writing. Her pursuit, the personal conversation with some unseen, singular person. A mind listening.