Trying to Remember Louise Glück

When Louise E. Glück passed away on Oct. 13 at the age of 80, the nation mourned the loss of one of its greatest poets. Her illustrious career as a poet and essayist was well-recognized by numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020. Her poetry collections were celebrated for their magical transformations of the ordinary into timeless objects of aesthetic pleasure. Her essays on poetry put forth an opinionated vision of American poetry and the potential of writing in a country always inventing itself.

When I first heard of her death I did not feel anything. The relationship between writers and readers can sometimes be hard to qualify. She was not a celebrity to me like Bella Hadid or Lana Del Rey. She was someone whose talent I deeply admired, someone whose words moved me but did not necessarily make me feel as if she were a friend. It was difficult for me to speak to the exact impact she had on my life.

The first time I saw Glück in person, she looked about the size of my thumb from where she stood — on a stage. I was sitting in one of the last few rows of Paine Hall, awestruck and still sniffling from the Cambridge cold. Freshman fall meant many things: new weather, new school, new friends, and the irresistible promise of meeting your idols at a school where many say anything can happen. Seeing Glück read out her poems — her voice introducing pauses previously hidden from the page — was one of the first moments I felt that Harvard was something special.

One of the collections from which Glück read aloud that evening was her Pulitzer-prize-winning collection “The Wild Iris.” It features a series of poems written from the perspective of different plants, creating a lyrical world where minuscule flowers speak about universal notions. It was a collection that I had come across in high school when we were learning about the literary device “persona.”

This collection kept reappearing in my life. A selection of poems were chosen as radical visions of decentering anthropocentric notions of plant consciousness during my winter internship with Dumbarton Oaks. My adviser presented her choice to speak from the point of view of flowers as more than just aesthetic — it was placed in conversation with ancient forms of knowledge that decentered the human mind.

The titular poem was chosen during my first-year seminar on lyric poetry due to the echoes of Sappho’s work it contained — an example of the ways in which the classical and modern worlds connected. After these encounters, I purchased the collection and it became one of the two books that I kept by my bed, alongside “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath. I find myself returning to poems like “The Silver Lily” and “Witchgrass” for their drastic reimaginings of time — the eternal way perennial plants experience the cyclicity of seasons, or the striking temporality of the fragile flower. It is in light of this that her death feels strangely unreal, its finality in tension with the timelessness of her words.

While I’m sure she had no clue, I owe Glück for being a formative part of my college experience. The fascination with plant consciousness that her collection sparked would eventually lead me to declare a joint concentration between Comparative Literature and Environmental Science. This is inconsequential in the larger scheme of her literary accomplishments, but this was her legacy to me — my image of her amidst the medals and awards.

It is sobering to realize that there will be no new poems from her, yet every time I read her poems, I see something a little different; something that makes it feel like there is always more to discover. It feels like she lives on.

After learning about her death, I leafed through the pages of “The Wild Iris” and the end of the titular poem kept coming back to me: “from the center of my life came/ a great fountain, deep blue/ shadows on azure seawater.” There, she spoke as a wild iris, but I cannot help but feel this was closely inspired by her own life and the many images that she’s gifted the world — seemingly transient but with whispers of infinity.

—Staff writer Sean Wang Zi-Ming can be reached at sean.wangzi-ming@thecrimson.com.