Poet and Nobel laureate Louise Gluck has died aged 80.
Gluck’s death was confirmed by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Over more than 60 years of published work, Gluck forged a narrative of trauma, disillusion and longing, with occasional moments of ecstasy and contentment.
In awarding her the literature prize in 2020, the first time an American poet had been honoured since TS Eliot in 1948, Nobel judges praised “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
Gluck’s poems were often brief, a page or less in length.
Influenced by Shakespeare, Greek mythology and Eliot among others, she questioned and at times dismissed outright the bonds of love and sex, what she called the “premise of union” in her most famous poem, Mock Orange.
“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last,” she once wrote.
In her poem Summer, the narrator addresses her husband and remembers “the days of our first happiness,” when everything seemed to have “ripened.”
Gluck published more than a dozen books of poetry, along with essays and a brief prose fable, Marigold and Rose.
In 1993, she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, an exchange in part between a beleaguered gardener and a callous deity.
Her other books included the collections The Seven Ages, The Triumph of Achilles, Vita Nova and a highly acclaimed 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 lyric poetry that defies all attempts to label it definitively”.
Gluck was married and divorced twice and had a son, Noah, with her second husband, John Darnow.
She taught at several universities, including Stanford University and Yale University, and regarded her experiences in the classroom not as a distraction from her poetry, but as a “prescription for lassitude”.
“You would hand in something and Louise would find the one line that worked,” the poet Claudia Rankine, who studied under Gluck at Williams College, told The Associated Press in 2020.
“There was no place for the niceties of mediocrity, no false praise. When Louise speaks you believe her because she doesn’t hide inside of civility.”
A native of New York City who grew up on Long Island, New York, she was a descendant of Eastern European Jews and heir to a creation not associated with poetry: Her father helped invent the X-Acto knife.
Her mother, Gluck would write, was the family’s “maid-of-all-work moral leader”, the one whose assessment of her stories and poems she looked to above all others.
Gluck was also the middle of three sisters, one of whom died before was she born, a tragedy she seemed to refer to in her poem Parados.
As a teenager she suffered from anorexia. 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 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.”
Gluck was too frail to become a full-time college student and instead sat in on classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, finding mentors in the poets-teachers Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz.
By her mid-20s, she was publishing poems in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines.
Gluck’s debut book, Firstborn, 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.
Her second book, The House On Marshland, came out in 1975 and is considered her critical breakthrough. Subsequent books such as The Wild Iris and Ararat became testaments to personal and creative reinvention, as if her older books had been written by someone else.
“I’ve always had this sort of magical-thinking way of detesting my previous books as a way of pushing myself forward,” she told the Washington Square Review in 2015.
“And I realised that I had this feeling of sneaking-up pride in accomplishment. Sometimes I would just stack my books together and think, ‘Wow, you haven’t wasted all your time’. But then I was very afraid because it was a completely new sensation, that pride, and I thought, ‘Oh, this means really bad things’.”
