‘October’ by Louis Glück is a poem that describes the change in the natural world during October. It is the time of autumn when the earth takes a new shape. It wears the robe of new leaves and transforms into her former self again. The poet highlights the natural change at the beginning of autumn. Her voice seems confused at the sight. She cannot decide either it is the change or she is in a dream. She questions herself repeatedly and answers her musings. This chain of cause and effect somehow gives the poem a new look. Though she is talking about a conventional theme, her thoughts in October are unique. _____ "Identifying with the season of autumn, the dark of it, the barren, irreversible future of it, and the beauty of it, which is not seen as redemptive, the voice of Louise Glück is starker, more direct, more emotionally charged than it has ever been. October is a masterpiece."—Mark Strand _____ Louise Elisabeth Glück is an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal"
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 is 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 currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches as the Rosencranz writer in residence at Yale University and in the creative writing program of Boston University.
