Gretel in Darkness

Louise Glück is among the most lauded poets in the American canon. Glück’s writing is often surgically precise in terms of formal craft, and reveals a deep emotional complexity. She addresses sadness, mourning, trauma, and individual suffering metaphorically through the natural world, mythology, autobiographical events, or universal truths. She is known for alluding to cultural myths and personas in her work, some of which appear in “Gretel in Darkness” through the perspective of young Gretel from the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.” Her poem “Gretel in Darkness” first appeared in the 1975 collection The House on Marshland and investigates a form of PTSD through the lens of fairy tales.

Poet Biography

Louise Elisabeth Glück (1943-present) is an American writer who has published numerous books of poems and essays. Her debut, Firstborn, arrived in 1968, and since then she has gone on to publish a total of 13 poetry collections, forming an impressive body of work. Among her many distinctions, Glück has received a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1993), the Bollingen Prize (2001), served as the US Poet Laureate (2003-2004), and earned a National Book Award (2014), along with a National Humanities Medal (2015). After receiving the illustrious Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, the judges commented that she writes with an “unmistakable poetic voice… with austere beauty [that] makes individual existence universal.