Lisel Mueller (born Elisabeth Neumann, February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020) was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher. Her family fled the Nazi regime, and she arrived in the U.S. in 1939 at the age of 15. She worked as a literary critic and taught at the
University of Chicago,
Elmhurst College and
Goddard College. She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study. She received awards including the
National Book Award in 1981 and the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize.[1]
Life and career
Mueller was born Elisabeth Neumann in
Hamburg. Her father, Fritz C. Neumann, was a high school teacher at the Gymnasium Alstertal. A
progressive educator, he delivered a speech in 1933 to an assembly of Hamburg teachers, warning of the dangers of Nazi ideology. When the Nazis came to power, he was dismissed. Her mother, Ilse (Burmester),[2] an elementary teacher, sustained the family. In 1935, her father was interrogated by the Gestapo for four days.[1] He emigrated, first to Italy, then to the U.S., where he was accepted in 1937 as a political refugee.[1] He became a professor of French and German at
Evansville College.[3] She followed with her mother and her younger sister Ingeborg, arriving on 9 June 1939.[1][4] In the U.S., she used the name Lisel.[1] She graduated from the
University of Evansville in 1944.[5] Her mother died in 1953,[5] and she then began to write poetry, publishing the first small collection, Dependencies, in 1965 after twelve years of self-studies.[1]
In 1943, she married Paul Mueller.[1] The couple built a home in the Chicago suburb of
Lake Forest, Illinois, in the 1960s, and she wrote: "Though my family landed in the Midwest, we lived in urban or suburban environments." They raised two daughters, Lucy and Jenny.[1][4] She made money by working as a receptionist in a doctor's office[1] and writing book reviews for the Chicago Daily News, which hired her in the 1970s.[5]
During her last years, Mueller resided in a retirement community in Chicago, Illinois.[3][4] She died on February 21, 2020, at the age of 96.[4]
Books
Poetry
Mueller's poems often depart from seemingly simple observations. While her work is in English, it reflects her German roots. She sometimes alludes to German fairy-tales by the
Brothers Grimm, and quotes
Bertold Brecht. In her 1992 autobiographical poem "Curriculum Vitae", she writes: "My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes".[1]
Her poems have been described as extremely accessible, yet intricate and layered. While at times whimsical and possessing a sly humor, there is an underlying sadness in much of her work.[6][7]
Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (1996) — winner of the Pulitzer Prize.[1][9] In 2018, the poems The Story, An Unanswered Question, and Hope were set to a song cycle, "Three Lisel Mueller Settings," by composer
Max Raimi, which was featured in the 2023
Grammy-winning album Contemporary American Composers.[10][11][12][13]
Translation
She published several volumes of translation, including
Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1980)[14][15]