Nobel laureate Louise Glück, a poet of indelible candor and perception who wove classical allusions, philosophical homages, bittersweet memories and humorous asides into indelible portraits of a fallen and heartbreaking world, has died at 80.
Glück’s death was confirmed on Friday by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
She died of cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to her publisher.
A former student of Glück’s, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham, said the author was only recently diagnosed.
“I find it very like her that she only found out she had cancer a few days before she died of cancer,” Graham said.
“Her whole sensibility—both on and off the page—was cut so close to the spine of time.”
In a career spanning more than 60 years, Glück has shaped a narrative of trauma, disillusionment, stasis and longing, punctuated by moments – but only moments – of ecstasy and contentment.
In awarding her the literature prize in 2020, the first time an American poet has been honored since TS Eliot in 1948, Nobel judges praised ‘her unmistakable poetic voice which with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’.
Louise Glück, Nobel Prize-winning poet of concise and candid lyrics, dies at 80
Glück’s poems were often short, a page or less in length, examples of her attachment to ‘the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence’.
Influenced by Shakespeare, Greek mythology and Eliot, among others, she questioned and sometimes completely dismissed the bonds of love and sex, which she called the ‘starting point of union’ in her most famous poem, ‘Mock Orange’.
In some ways, life for Glück was like a murky romance—destined for unhappiness, but meaningful because pain was our natural state—and preferable to what she assumed would follow.
“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if sharp enough, can last,” she once wrote.
Poet Tracy K. Smith, a Pulitzer winner, said in a statement Friday that Glück’s poetry “saved” her many times.
“I keep thinking of these lines from ‘The Wild Iris’: ‘At the end of my suffering / there was a door.’
And from these lines from ‘The House on Marshland’: ‘The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.’
It’s as if her spare, patient syntax forms a path to and through the weight of life,’ she wrote.
Glück published more than a dozen books of poetry, along with essays and a short prose fable, ‘Gardens and Roses.’
She used everything from Penelope’s weaving in ‘The Odyssey’ to an unlikely muse, the Meadowlands Sports Complex, which inspired her to ask: ‘How could the Giants name/place the Meadowlands? It has/about as much in common with a pasture/as the inside of an oven.’
In 1993 she won the Pulitzer Prize for ‘The Wild Iris’, an exchange between a beleaguered gardener and an unfeeling deity.
‘What is my heart to you/that you have to break it over and over,’ wonders the gardener.
The god replies: ‘My poor inspired creation… You are/too little like me in the end/to please me.’
Her other books included the collections ‘The Seven Ages’, ‘The Triomph of Achilles’, ‘Vita Nova’ and a highly regarded anthology, ‘Poems 1962-2012’.
Besides winning the Pulitzer, she received the Bollingen Prize in 2001 for lifetime achievement and the National Book Award in 2014 for ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’.
She was the US Poet Laureate in 2003-2004 and was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2015 for her ‘decades of powerful lyrical poetry that defies all attempts to definitively name it’.
Glück was married and divorced twice and had a son, Noah, with her second husband, John Darnow.
She taught at several schools, including Stanford University and Yale University, and saw her experiences in the classroom not as a distraction from her poetry, but as a “prescription for lassitude.”
In a career spanning more than 60 years, Glück has shaped a narrative of trauma, disillusionment, stasis and longing, punctuated by moments – but only moments – of ecstasy and contentment
Students will remember her as demanding and inspiring, not above making anyone cry, but also appreciative of guiding young people in search of their own voices.
“You’ll hand something in and Louise will find the one line that works,” poet Claudia Rankine, who studied under Glück at Williams College, told The Associated Press in 2020.
‘There was no place for the pleasures of mediocrity, no false praise. When Louise talks, you believe her, because she doesn’t hide in civility.’
A New York City native who grew up on Long Island, New York, she was a descendant of Eastern European Jews and heir to an everyday creation unrelated to poetry: Her father helped create the X-Acto – to find out.
Her mother, Glück would write, was the family’s ‘maid-of-all-work moral leader’, the one whose judgment of her stories and poems she looked to above all others.
Glück was also the middle of three sisters, one of whom died before she was born, a tragedy she seems to have alluded to in her poem ‘Parados’.
Describing herself as born to ‘bear witness’, Glück felt at home with the written word and considered the English language her gift, even her ‘inheritance’.
But as a teenager she was so intensely ambitious and self-critical that she waged war with her own body.
She suffered from anorexia, dropped to 75 pounds (34 kilograms), and was terrorized by her mortality. Her life, creative and otherwise, was saved after she chose to see a psychoanalyst.
‘Analysis taught me to think. Taught me to use my tendency to object to articulated ideas about my own ideas, taught me to use doubt, to examine my own speech for its evasions and excisions,’ she recalled during a 1989 lecture at the Guggenheim Museum.
‘The longer I withheld conclusion, the more I saw. I also learned, I believe, how to write.’
Too weak to become a full-time college student, Glück instead took classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, finding mentors in poet teachers Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz.
By her mid-20s, she was publishing poems in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines.
Glück’s debut book, First Born, was published in 1968 and preceded a long stretch of writer’s block that ended while she was teaching at Goddard College in the early 1970s.
She once believed that poets should shun the academy, but found the engagement with Goddard students so enriching that she began writing poems again, work that she also considered the ‘rigid renditions’ of ‘Firstborn’.
Out of her silence she discovers a new and more dynamic voice.
Her second book, ‘The House on Marshland’, appeared in 1975 and is considered her critical breakthrough.
But she continued to suffer years of what she called ‘brutal punishing emptiness’, when she tried everything from gardening to listening to Sam Cooke records to break out.
Subsequent books such as ‘The Wild Iris’ and ‘Ararat’ became evidence of personal and creative reinvention, as if her older books had been written by someone else.
“I’ve always had this kind of magical thinking of hating my previous books as a way to push myself forward,” she told the Washington Square Review in 2015.
‘And I realized that I had this sense of sneaky pride in achievement. Sometimes I just piled my books together and thought, ‘Wow, you haven’t wasted all your time.’
But then I was very scared because it was a completely new sensation, that pride, and I thought, ‘Oh, this means really bad things.’