Since the sudden, and much lamented, death of Louise Glück on Oct. 13, there has been an outpouring of remembrances and essays honoring her as a great poet and a vital figure in the contemporary American literary landscape.

Author of 14 collections of poetry, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, and recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she was “acclaimed as one of America’s greatest living writers… whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world… was broadly accessible, both to critics, who praised her clarity and precise lyricism, and the broader reading public.” (The New York Times)

Her first book was published in 1962 and her latest, “Winter Recipes from the Collective,” in 2021. Throughout this large body of work are woven the threads that affirm that circular nature of our poetic heritage that is celebrated by her fellow laureate, T. S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets –– “In my beginning is my end.”

In her Nobel acceptance speech, Louise Glück said:

“The poems to which I have been most ardently drawn are poems in which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator. As with Emily Dickinson ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?/ Are you –– Nobody –– too?/ Then there’s a pair of us!’ - and Eliot in ‘Prufrock’

‘Let us go then, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table; …’ ’’

With these words she seems to be calling up not just “Prufrock,” but the Eliot who wrote in his 1945 essay, “The Music of Poetry,” “while poetry attempts to convey something beyond what can be conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one person talking to another.” And further, “poetry must not stray too far from the ordinary everyday language which we use and hear.”

If Louise Glück was drawn to Eliot and classical mythology, it was to the 17th century priest poet, George Herbert, that Eliot looked for perfection in simplicity of speech and “ordinary everyday language.” In a talk given at Salisbury Cathedral in 1938, Eliot says of Herbert “It is by an easy conversational familiarity, even homeliness, that Herbert communicates with us as one person to another.” Here is Herbert’s “Jordan (1)”:

“Who says that fictions and false hair

Become a verse? Is there no truth in beauty?

Is all good structure in a winding stair?

May no lines pass, except they do their duty

Not to a true, but painted chair?”

Eliot wove these thoughts about language into Movement V of “Little Gidding,” the last of the Four Quartets:

“(where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others,

. . . . . . .

The complete consort dancing together)”

Continuing in this tradition, Glück’s poems are just that, conversations between the poet and the reader or listener, “as one person to another.”

This is from “President’s Day” (2019), an unrhymed lyric with varying line lengths, mostly trimeter, but starting off with an iambic pentameter running on to the next line, giving a warm conversational effect that immediately engages the reader:

“Lots of good-natured sunshine everywhere

making the snow glitter ––– quite

lifelike I thought, nice

to see that again;”

And then–––

“And sure enough

the clouds came back, and sure enough

the sky grew dark and menacing,

. . . . . .

And yet moments ago

the sun was shining. How joyful my head was,

. . . . . . . . .

Joyful–––now there’s a word

we haven’t used in a while.”

Here are lines from the lyric “The Wild Iris,” the title poem of her 1992 book:

“At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember.

. . . . . . .

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:”

In these lines we can hear echoes of Eliot in Movement V of “Little Gidding”:

“We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.”

“The modern poet and the poets of ages past coexist in the here and now.” This is Eliot in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” It is, again, in this tradition that Louise Glück in her 1996 book, Meadowlands, tells the story of Penelope, Odysseus, and their marriage, with frequent commentary from their son Telemachus. In their broad and deep range of reference –– Dante was a rich source for them both –– T. S. Eliot and Louise Glück were both modern poets who coexisted with poets of ages past.

Which brings us to today, to Homer and the much anticipated new translation of The Iliad by Emily Wilson, following on her translation of The Odyssey of two years ago - the first Homer translations by a woman. Like Louise Glück’s poems, these ancient stories are rendered by Emily Wilson “in the here and now.”

The Odyssey, an epic of love and loyalty, adventure, and trouble (often trouble intentionally sought out by Odysseus!), is as immediate and alive today as when Homer proclaimed these tales to audiences millennia ago, in spoken conversation, then as now, “as between one person and another.” And just as the griefs and pities of war described in The Iliad are, once again, too much with us, Homer offers, in his telling of that tale of unfathomable grief and pity, what the Greeks called catharsis –– the release, literally purgation, from overwhelming emotions of grief or loss.

So it is that Homer brings us back, full circle ––“the complete consort dancing together”–– to Louise Glück’s poetry “of trauma and loss,” –– poems that offer catharsis to the reader she describes in her Nobel Speech, the reader who is the “recipient of a confidence or an outcry,” and who is sometimes “a co-conspirator.”

Let’s close our conversation with these closing lines from “The Wild Iris”:

“from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure seawater.”

And let’s close the circle, as Eliot did, with the last words of “East Coker” ––– “In my end is my beginning.”

Belinda de Kay is director emeritus of the Stonington Free Library.