Louise Glück

Louise Glück, Nobel prize-winning poet, dies at 80

Pulitzer prize winner and former US poet laureate was known for her sharp, austere lyrical work

Adrian Horton

Friday 13 October 2023

Louise Glück, the Nobel prize-winning author and a former poet laureate of the United States, has died at the age of 80.

Her death was confirmed Friday to the Associated Press by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

A poet of succinct candor, often sadness, who worked in allusions of classical mythology amid recollections and philosophical insights, Glück was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2020.

The Nobel judges praised “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. Her poems, often brutally sharp at a page or less, demonstrated her commitment to “the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence”.

A native of New York, Glück published more than a dozen books of poetry in her lifetime, along with essays and a brief prose fable, Marigold and Rose. Her work was heavily influenced by classical mythology, Shakespeare and Eliot, among others.

She received the Pulitzer prize in 1993 for Wild Iris, a book of poems which dealt with themes of suffering, death and rebirth. Other works include the collections The Seven Ages, The Triumph of Achilles, Vita Nova and the anthology Poems 1962-2012.

Besides the Pulitzer, Glück received numerous other literary awards, including Bollingen prize for lifetime achievement in 2001, the National Book award in 2014 for Faithful and Virtuous Night, and the 2015 National Humanities Medal for her “decades of powerful lyric poetry that defies all attempts to label it definitively”.

She also served as the US poet laureate from 2003-2004, and taught generations of aspiring writers at such institutions as Stanford and Yale.

Born on 22 April 1943 in New York City, Glück descended from eastern European Jews and was raised on Long Island. Her father, Daniel Glück, was a businessman partially credited with inventing the X-Acto knife; her mother, Beatrice Glück, was a homemaker.

She developed an interest in poetry at a young age, though her later education was derailed by anorexia nervosa, which consumed much of her adolescence and early 20s. Too frail to attend college, Glück sat in on classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, where she found mentors in the poet-teachers Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz.

She later credited her life – and ability to write – to seven years of intensive psychoanalysis in her 20s. “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 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 was learning, I believe, how to write, as well.” By her mid-20s, she was publishing poems in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines.

Her first book of poems, Firstborn, was published in 1968 and preceded years of writer’s block; her second book, The House on Marshland, was released in 1975 to breakthrough literary success. Subsequent works, including The Wild Iris and Ararat, became testaments to creative reinvention and challenge. “The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last,” she once wrote.

Glück was married and divorced twice, first in 1967 to Charles Hertz Jr, and to John Dranow in 1977, with whom she shared a son, Noah.