K I S S: Louise Glück, poet and Nobel laureate, dies at 80

Louise Glück

Louise Glück, poet and Nobel laureate, dies at 80

By Max Matza

BBC News

Acclaimed American poet and Nobel laureate in literature Louise Glück has died at the age of 80.

She received a Nobel in 2020, becoming the first American poet to win the honour since TS Eliot more than 70 years earlier.

Her poems often spoke of trauma and disillusion, with her most famous poem, "Mock Orange", questioning the value of love and sex.

Glück's death was confirmed by her publishers on Friday.

"Louise Gluck's poetry gives voice to our untrusting but unstillable need for knowledge and connection in an often unreliable world," her longtime editor Jonathan Galassi said in a statement. "Her work is immortal."

A friend told the New York Times that she died of cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Glück was the US poet laureate from 2003 to 2004 and most recently worked as a professor of English at Yale University and a professor of poetry at Stanford University.

She was awarded almost every prize an American poet might hope for.

The Nobel judges in 2020 praised her for "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal".

She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris, a book of poems which dealt with themes of suffering, death and rebirth.

Her other honours include the 2001 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, given in 2008, the National Book Award in 2014, and a National Humanities Medal, awarded in 2015 by Barack Obama.

Glück, whose name is pronounced "Glick", was born in 1943 in New York, and published more than a dozen books of poetry over her lifetime.

Her works were short, often less than one page, and focused on the painful reality of being human, dealing with themes such as death, childhood, and family life.

She also took inspiration from Greek mythology and its characters, such as Persephone and Eurydice, who are often the victims of betrayal.

Her debut book, released in 1968, was titled Firstborn and was published after she dropped out of college and had her first of two divorces.

Her father, who helped invent the X-Acto Knife, encouraged her writing. But she had a difficult childhood, which included hospital treatment for anorexia.

"My interactions with the world as a social being were unnatural, forced, performances, and I was happiest reading," she said of her childhood in one 2006 interview.

For a sample of her work, look to the final line of her poem Nostos, named for a Greek term meaning "homecoming".

We look at the world once, in childhood.

The rest is memory.

BBC