Louise Glück

Louise Glück (born April 22, 1943, New York, New York, U.S.—died October 13, 2023, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American poet whose willingness to confront the horrible, the difficult, and the painful resulted in a body of work characterized by insight and a severe lyricism. In 2020 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

After attending Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and Columbia University in New York City, Glück taught poetry at numerous colleges and universities, including Harvard and Yale. Her first collection of poetry, Firstborn (1968), used a variety of first-person personae, all disaffected or angry. The collection’s tone disturbed many critics, but Glück’s exquisitely controlled language and imaginative use of rhyme and metre delighted others. Although its outlook is equally grim, The House on Marshland (1975) shows a greater mastery of voice. There, as in her later volumes, Glück’s personae included historic and mythic figures such as Gretel and Joan of Arc. Her adoption of different perspectives became increasingly imaginative; for example, in “The Sick Child,” from the collection Descending Figure (1980), her voice is that of a mother in a museum painting looking out at the bright gallery. The poems in The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, address archetypal subjects of classic myth, fairy tales, and the Bible. These concerns are also evident in Ararat (1990), which has been acclaimed for searing honesty in its examination of the family and the self.

In 1993 Glück won a Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris (1992). Her later works included Meadowlands (1996), The First Five Books of Poems (1997), and The Seven Ages (2001). Averno (2006) was her well-received treatment of the Persephone myth. The poems collected in A Village Life (2009)—about existence in a small Mediterranean town—were written in a lavishly descriptive style that significantly departed from the parsimony that characterizes her earlier verse. Poems 1962–2012 (2012) compiled all her published volumes of poetry. Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014) deals with mortality and nocturnal silence, sometimes from a male perspective; it won the National Book Award. The poems in Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021) often read like fables or short stories. In 2022 Glück released her first work of fiction, Marigold and Rose. The novella centres on a pair of infant twins.

Glück was editor of The Best American Poetry 1993 (1993). Her essay collections on poetry included Proofs and Theories (1994) and American Originality (2017). In 2001 she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Glück served as poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (2003–04). Her later honours included the Wallace Stevens Award (2008) and a National Humanities Medal (2015).