Louise Glück

Louise Glück, the poet whose spare, unflinching lyrics earned her the Pulitzer Prize, a term as Poet Laureate of the United States and the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, died of cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 13, 2023. She was eighty. Louise Elisabeth Glück was born in New York City on April 22, 1943, and grew up on Long Island. Her paternal grandparents were Hungarian Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in 1900 and eventually owned a grocery store in New York. Her father, Daniel Glück, had hoped to be a writer but went into business with his brother-in-law, and together they invented the X-Acto knife. Her mother, Beatrice Grosby Glück, a Wellesley College graduate, taught her Greek mythology and the story of Joan of Arc. She began writing poems as a child. She never earned a college degree. She took a poetry class at Sarah Lawrence College and, from 1963 to 1966, attended workshops for non-degree students at Columbia University's School of General Studies, where she studied with Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz, whom she called significant mentors. She supported herself with secretarial work, and her first book, Firstborn, appeared in 1968. A long writer's block lifted, she said, only in 1971, when she began teaching poetry at Goddard College in Vermont, the same year a fire destroyed her Vermont house and most of what she owned. She joined the faculty of Williams College in 1984. The Wild Iris (1992), in which garden flowers talk with a gardener and a deity about the nature of life, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. She was Poet Laureate in 2003 and 2004 and judged the Yale Series of Younger Poets from 2003 to 2010. Her other honors included the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize and the National Humanities Medal. The Swedish Academy praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." She delivered her Nobel lecture in writing, recalling her early reading of William Blake and Emily Dickinson. She taught at Yale University, where she was named Frederick Iseman Professor in the Practice of Poetry, and at Stanford, and divided her time among Cambridge, Montpelier, Vermont, and Berkeley, California. Her papers are held at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.