This year’s holiday greeting from the library celebrates the American poet Louise Glück

University Librarian Barbara Rockenbach has chosen an oil painting by the American poet and essayist Louise Glück (1943–2023) as this year’s holiday card illustration.

The award-winning poet’s papers and artwork are in the library’s collection at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The Louise Glück Papers contain Glück’s notebooks, individual poems, and manuscript drafts of collections, including her master works “Aratat,” “The Wild Iris,” “Meadowlands,” “Vita Nuova,” “A Village Life,” and “Faithful and Virtuous Night.” Correspondence and the writings of fellow poets Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, Claudia Rankine, and others provide insight into her life and literary circle.

Glück, considered one of America’s greatest lyric poets, was the author of 13 collections of poetry, 2 books of essays, and a fable-like fiction. She joined the Yale faculty in 2004 as the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence. From 2003 to 2010, she supported young writers as a judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Highly regarded at Yale as a dedicated teacher and mentor to her students, in 2020 she was named the Frederick Iseman Professor in the Practice of Poetry at Yale University. 

Glück was the recipient of countless honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for “Wild Iris” in 1993 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020. 

Six of Glück’s untitled oil and watercolor paintings, including the one shown here, are also in the library’s Digital Collections. (Three of them are available to view with a NetID login to the Yale network.)

—Deborah Cannarella

Image: Untitled painting by Louise Glück, 1963. Copyright (c) The Estate of Louise Glück. No reproduction without permission. Louise Glück Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library