Mueller, Lisel

▪ 1998

      Throughout a long-established career as a poet, Lisel Mueller had been honoured with a number of literary awards, ranging from the National Book Award in 1981 for The Need to Hold Still (1980) to the Illinois Poet Laureate Award in 1987, but in 1997 she found herself celebrating an unexpected honour. With a body of work heralded as quiet and powerful, enchanting and warm, Mueller won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Alive Together: New and Selected Poems.

      Lisel Neumann, the daughter of schoolteachers, was born on Feb. 8, 1924, in Hamburg, Ger. During the mid- and late 1930s, she and her family moved often and abruptly to places such as Italy and France to evade Nazi persecution. In 1939, at the age of 15, she fled Europe with her mother and sister. Her father, Fritz Neumann, had already acquired a professorship at Evansville (Ind.) College (now the University of Evansville), and the family established a residence there. It was those experiences in particular that inspired themes pertaining to a cultural and family history in poems that were often dour and explicit yet sensuously palpable.

      The death of her mother in 1953 prompted Mueller to begin writing in earnest. In "When I Am Asked" she says, "I sat on a gray stone bench ringed with the ingenue faces of pink and white impatiens and placed my grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with me."

      Drawn to the modernist school of writing, Mueller was highly influenced by such poets as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Mueller's lyrical poetry bent toward the mythological, depicting fantastic characters and dreamlike milieus with the sturdy, accessible diction often found in folklore. In "Paul Delvaux: The Village of the Mermaids" she wrote:

The mermaids, if that is what they are under their full-length skirts, sit facing each other all down the street, more of an alley, in front of their gray row houses. They all look the same, like a fair-haired order of nuns, or like prostitutes with chaste identical faces. How calm they are, with their vacant eyes, their hands in laps that betray nothing. Only one has scales on her dusky dress.

      Prior to achieving universal acclaim as a poet, Mueller wrote prose. Her first major publication was a book of essays printed in 1965. She also worked as a book reviewer for the Chicago Daily News before becoming a founding member of the Poetry Center of Chicago. Later Mueller frequently taught and gave lectures on creative writing at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst (Ill.) College, and Goddard College, Plainfield, Vt.. Some of her other volumes of poetry include The Private Life (1976), Waving from Shore (1989), and Learning to Play by Ear (1990).

      Mueller, the mother of two daughters, resided in Lake Forest, Ill., with her husband of 53 years. Although she was nearly blind, suffering from the degenerative eye disease glaucoma as well as cataracts, she continued to render poems with strength in the midst of grief and tragedy, fantasy within the vivid harshness of reality.

JACKIE ORIHILL

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