Born: Hamburg, Germany; February 8, 1924
PRINCIPAL POETRY
Dependencies, 1965
Life of a Queen, 1970 (chapbook)
The Private Life, 1976
Voices from the Forest, 1977 (chapbook)
The Need to Hold Still, 1980
Second Language, 1986
Waving from Shore, 1989
Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, 1996
OTHER LITERARY FORMS
Drawing upon her native language, Lisel Mueller (MYEWL-ur) has published translations of the works of two German women, including Three Daughters (1987), a novel by Anna Mitgutsch; Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1980); Whether or Not (1984), a prose work by Kaschnitz; and Circe’s Mountain (1990), a collection of Kaschnitz’s short stories.
Throughout her career, Mueller has also written critical articles and reviews for the magazine Poetry and for the Chicago Daily News. Her essay “Midwestern Poetry: Goodbye to All That” appears in a collection of essays Voyages to the Inland Sea I (1971), edited by John Judson. Also, a brief essay titled “Parentage and Good Luck” appears in Where We Stand: Women Poets and the Literary Tradition (1993), edited by Sharon Bryan.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Although Lisel Mueller began writing poetry in college, she did not turn to serious writing of poetry for several more years. Her first volume of poems, Dependencies, was published in 1965. This volume is often regarded as excessively literary, but the lead poem, “The Blind Leading the Blind,” is frequently anthologized. Mueller’s second full volume of poetry, The Private Life, won the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1975. Mueller received the National Book Award in Poetry (1981) for The Need to Hold Still, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest (1985), and the Carl Sandburg Literary Award (1989). She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1997 for Alive Together and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2002.
BIOGRAPHY
Lisel Mueller was born Lisel Neumann in Hamburg, Germany, to Fritz C. Neumann and Illse Burmester Neumann, both teachers. Leaving her grandparents behind, her immediate family fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and settled in Evansville, Indiana. Mueller was blessed with a set of parents who were, according to Mueller, “wholly and blessedly gender-blind.” Mueller characterizes her mother as “feminine in the sense that she was warm, outgoing, and impulsive, but she was totally ignorant of ‘feminine wiles,’ such as manipulation of, and deference to, men.” It was only when Mueller moved to Evansville, Indiana, at the age of fifteen that she discovered the more traditional roles of women and gender discrimination.
In 1943, Lisel Neumann married Paul Mueller, an editor, and they had two daughters, Lucy and Jenny. Although Mueller would dabble in poetry while in college, preparing for a social-work career, she began to write serious poetry only after the death of her mother in 1953. Many years later she explained, in her poem “When I Am Asked,” why she began writing poetry: On a beautiful June day shortly after her mother died, Mueller discovered that she had to place her grief “in the mouth of language,/ the only thing that would grieve with me.”
Mueller has worked as an instructor of creative writing at Elmhurst College, Goddard College, and the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. She is a selftaught poet, strongly influenced by the New Critics, including T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, I. A. Richards, and John Crowe Ransom. Mueller greatly admires Wallace Stevens; although she does not believe that she writes anything like Stevens, she does allude frequently to his poems in her own work. Mueller also developed her critical skills and her awareness of contemporary poetry by writing reviews for the Chicago Daily News. Perhaps most important, Mueller has drawn upon her life experiences as a mother and spouse for the material of her poems.
Mueller remained almost exclusively in the Midwest after her arrival in the United States, and it is a midwestern landscape that appears most often in her poetry. However, she has never been simply midwestern in her thoughts or outlook. Of the Midwest she says,
I am more at home here than anywhere. At the same time I am not a native; I see the culture and myself in it, through a scrim, with European eyes, and my poetry accommodates a bias toward historical determinism, no doubt the burdensome heritage of a twentieth century native German.
ANALYSIS
Lisel Mueller’s poetry is unassuming, spare, and solidly grounded in history, both public and private. Without the banners of feminism or other celebrated causes, Mueller has quietly and steadily recorded her impressions of life in the United States. Her perspective is unique, marked as it is by her immigration experience at the age of fifteen and the loss of her grandparents to the horrors of Nazi Germany. She writes of life events that are the causes for quiet celebration—a long, happy marriage, the birth and lives of her children, and the inevitable process of growing old.
DEPENDENCIES
Looking back, Mueller was not happy with most of the poems that she wrote in Dependencies. She said that they “seem overly decorated, too metaphorical.” Most critics agree that these poems are overly literary, but this is only a mark of the New Critics that Mueller studied so closely. The lead poem, “The Blind Leading the Blind,” presents the theme of interdependencies between human beings, a theme that appears often in her poetry. In this poem, Mueller uses a cave metaphor, reminiscent of Plato’s cave parable, to represent the journey of two companions through major life events. The speaker, presumably female, is the guide, and she speaks with the natural authority of one who has ”been here before.” She knows where the ground is rock, where it is mud, where there are turn-offs. However, she reiterates her need for the other, the fact that “there are two of us here” in this cave, or on this journey through life.
Another important theme brought forth in this work is the continuity between generations of Mueller’s family. She writes of her pregnancy, a means of allowing the continuation of her and her spouse’s love. The birth of her child becomes part of healing the grief of her mother’s death; Mueller realizes that her own ability to love her daughter is a direct result of the love that she first experienced from her mother.
THE PRIVATE LIFE
Many critics agree that in Mueller’s next full volume of poetry, The Private Life, she reveals her most characteristic voice and themes. In an interview with Stan Sanvel Rubin and William Heyen, Mueller identifies two important ”springs” for her poetry: her domestic life with her husband and daughters, and the Vietnam War, which she says made her “think of the interdependency, certainly in our age, of the public and private life.” However, Mueller seldom alludes directly to the Vietnam War. The public life of World War II remains a greater immediate interest to her because of its more direct impact upon her family of origin.
“My Grandmother’s Gold Pin” begins as a charming explanation from a mother to a daughter about why the mother wears a particular pin so often. Each fleur-de-lis reminds the mother-speaker of objects in her grandparents’ home, their mannerisms, the music. When the mother comes to the center pearl in the pin, she is bitterly reminded of her grandparents’ death by starvation in an animal shed. Through this poem, Mueller illustrates that there can be no neat, clean separation between the public and private, past and present. The mother tells her daughter that this private memento, the pin, is
all I have left of an age when people believed the
heart was
an organ of goodness, and light stronger than
darkness,
that death came to you in your proper time:
An age when the dream of Man nearly came true.
The value of silence, the space beyond language or our immediate perceptions, is also an important theme introduced in The Private Life. “What the Dog Perhaps Hears” is a playful musing on all that people do not hear—the growth of a child, the unfurling of a snake, the birth of a baby bird pushing its way out of the shell. The final line “and we heard nothing when the world changed,” reminds us that so much takes place beyond the perception of the five senses.
The poem “The Private Life” begins with a flat statement: “What happens, happens in silence.” Things that happen in silence include what goes on inside other people’s heads, the death of an aspen in an ice storm, the rot of fruit at the market. The poet seems weary of words, especially the screaming headlines of the daily news. More important things are happening outside language: “in a red blood cell,/ a curl in the brain,/ in the ignorant ovum.”
THE NEED TO HOLD STILL
In the award-winning The Need to Hold Still, Mueller continues to explore the limitations of language and the continuity between past and present. She chooses to speak more often in the voices of others and begins to distance herself from her more youthful self. In “Talking to Helen,” Mueller speaks to Helen Keller, imagining the absence of both sight and sound in the sequence of perceptions that led to Keller’s realization of what the word ”water” means. In many ways, Keller’s perceptions, limited as they were to the tactile world, may have been superior to the poet’s own perceptions. Keller’s “world was imagination/ all possible worlds, while mine/ shrinks with the speed of speed.”
In “The Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley,” Mueller speaks in the voice of the nineteenth century novelist and author of Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, a woman with an enviably feminist upbringing. Shelley’s father ”taught [her] to think/ to value mind over body,/ to refuse even the airiest cage.” However, “None of this kept [Shelley] from bearing/ four children and losing three/ by the time [she] was twenty-two.” Mueller reminds her readers through this poem that feminism is possible only through medical science. Shelley remained a victim of biology and fate. However, the contemporary age is hardly superior with its demystification of the female body and of the heart:
You don’t speak of the heart
in your letters, your sharp-eyed poems
You speak about your bodies
as though they had no mystery,
no caves, no sudden turnings.
Shelley also refuses the role of the prophet, claiming, “But I only wanted to write/ a tale to tremble by.” It is only by accident that her tale predicted the potential horrors of human genetic engineering. Shelley was concerned only with the business of living and knowing what she could about her own life.
In the poem “The Need to Hold Still,” Mueller begins to explore the process of aging. Here, she uses winter weeds as a metaphor for the aging woman, who is, like the weeds, “among the thin/ the trampled on/ the inarticulate.” As a woman ages, she becomes less visible and demands less from life; she notices “that gray and brown/ are colors/ she disappears into// that her body/ has stopped asking/ for anything except calm.” However, aging has its compensations. There is less need to cling or to try to wring the “last drop of juice.” Dignity, design, cleanness of line all remain in the winter weeds as well as the aging woman.
SECOND LANGUAGE, WAVING FROM SHORE, AND ALIVE TOGETHER
A theme that unites Second Language, Waving from Shore, and Alive Together is the process of sorting through what is necessary, what is important, what to keep, and what to leave behind—a process more typical of one’s later years. In “Necessities,” Mueller examines what is necessary on her continued journey toward old age and death. One thing that is necessary is “a map of the world.” This map includes both the public and the private; it is the map with the landscape of our childhood, the place where we first made love, the roads that we did and did not take, “the private alps no one knows that we have climbed.” Other necessities include “the illusion of progress,” “answers to questions,” and “evidence that we matter.” It does not matter that people do not really progress, or that the answers may be wrong, or that the things people interpret as “evidence that we matter” may only be quirks of fate. The important thing is that humans momentarily believe, at least long enough to relieve their anxieties.
Mueller continues to grieve the loss of her parents throughout her life. In “Voyager” (Second Language), Mueller expresses the need for the “impossible photograph,” the one that would show the world the father that she remembered from her younger years. She must somehow come to terms with “the hardest knowledge:/ that no one will remember you/ when your daughters are gone.” Similarly, in “Missing the Dead” (Waving from Shore), Mueller wishes that she had more tangible evidence of her parents’ existence. She wishes that they had been musicians who left behind their musical scores or that she could believe that their bodies were transformed into stars that she could point to so that others might see “how they shimmer,/ how they keep getting brighter/ as we keep moving toward each other.”
Several poems from these three volumes deal directly with Mueller’s coming to terms with her own eventual death. In “Poem for My Birthday” (Waving from Shore), old age has brought Mueller to the point where she is no longer “the heroine of [her] bad dreams.” She has left behind “the melodramas/ of betrayal and narrow escapes.” She is no longer the one who takes foolish risks like “the one/ who swims too far out to sea.” Rather, she has become “the one who waves from shore,” a minor player in her own life. Mueller asks, “Does that mean I have solved my life?” In many ways, the answer to the question is affirmative. Language has its limitations, but the poet’s access to her own language stores has become more limited. In “Aphasia,” she observes that the world “no longer/ offers itself to [her]/ as an infinite dictionary.” However, this aging process that Mueller presents is far from a picture of grim, unrelenting diminishment. In “Monet Refuses the Operation,” the speaker (artist Claude Monet) refuses to believe that his way of seeing is simply “an aberration/ caused by old age, an affliction.” He responds to the doctors:
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see.
As Monet’s speech illustrates, the old can often “see” the interconnectedness of things in a way that the young can seldom “see.”
Mueller refuses to romanticize her own death or even the power of her own achievements beyond death. This vision is a difficult one to achieve; perhaps it takes someone who has lived at least half of his or her own life to understand it.
OTHER MAJOR WORKS
MISCELLANEOUS: Learning to Play by Ear: Essays and Early Poems, 1990.
TRANSLATIONS: The Great Salzburg Theatre of the World, 1969 (with John Reich; of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play Das Salzburger grosse Welttheater); Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, 1980; Whether or Not, 1984 (of Kaschnitz’s Steht noch dahin); Three Daughters, 1987 (of Anna Mitgutsch’s novel Züchtigung); Circe’s Mountain, 1990 (of Kaschnitz’s short stories).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bryan, Sharon, ed. Stand: Women Poets and the Literary Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Mueller’s essay “Parentage and Good Luck” appears in this collection and casts much light on the poet’s life and concerns.
Cruze, Karen DeBrulye. “Bringing It All Together.” Chicago Tribune, December 5, 1993, pp. 1-4. This feature provides insight into Mueller’s personal history through interviews with her, with her publisher at Louisiana State University Press, and with former students of Mueller.
Mueller, Lisel. “An Interview with Lisel Mueller.” Interview by Nancy Bunge. In Finding the Words: Interviews with Writers Who Teach, edited by Nancy Bunge. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1985. Bunge’s questions encourage Mueller to reflect on bilingualism, the arts of writing and teaching, and questions of ethics.
_______. “The Steady Interior Hum.” Interview by Stan Sanvel Rubin and William Heyden. In The Post-confessionals: Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, Judith Kitchen, and Rubin. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989. Mueller discusses inspiration, metaphor, and translation.
Preston, Rohan B. “‘Everything Is Autobiography’: Pulitzer Poet Lisel Mueller.” Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1997, p. 1. Written on the occasion of Mueller’s winning the Pulitzer Prize, this article calls her poetry “focused and accessible” and notes that it draws on her own life.
Solyn, Paul. “Lisel Mueller and the Idea of Midwestern Poetry.” In Regionalism and the Female Imagination: A Collection of Essays, edited by Emily Toth. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1985. Solyn takes issue with many points that Mueller makes in “Midwestern Poetry: Goodbye to All That.” Solyn is particularly disturbed by Mueller’s separation of rural and urban midwestern poets. Mueller does not believe that urban poets from large midwestern cities are distinctly different from other urban poets.
Nancy E. Sherrod