Louise Glück

Louise Glück (New York City, 1943 - Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023) was an American poet who wrote in English. Her work earned the Pulitzer Prize and the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, and made her one of the most influential voices in contemporary poetry in English. From 2003 to 2004 she served as Poet Laureate of the United States, at the Library of Congress. Readers have often noted the influence of Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Lowell on her work.

She was born into a Jewish family in New York City and grew up on Long Island. As a teenager she developed anorexia nervosa, an illness that shaped her late adolescence and early adulthood. She later described it as tied to an effort to assert independence from her mother. She left school in her final year to concentrate on her recovery, though she still graduated in 1961. She spent about seven years in therapy, which she credited with helping her overcome the illness and learn to think more clearly. She never completed a degree. Instead she took poetry classes at Sarah Lawrence College and, from 1963 to 1966, workshops at Columbia University's School of General Studies, where she studied with Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz, whom she regarded as important mentors.

Her first poems appeared in magazines such as Mademoiselle, Poetry and The New Yorker. Her debut collection, Firstborn (1968), drew some positive attention, though later critics judged it the work of a poet still leaning heavily on models such as Robert Lowell. After a long period of writer's block, she found a distinctive voice in The House on Marshland (1975), which many critics regard as her breakthrough. Her poetry combines emotional intensity with classical myth and natural imagery, used to meditate on trauma, desire, loss and modern life. For this reason she is often called an autobiographical poet, although scholars have also stressed the personas she constructs and the way her poems link personal experience with ancient stories.

In 1980 a fire destroyed her house in Vermont and most of her belongings, and the poems written afterward became The Triumph of Achilles (1985). Ararat (1990) followed the death of her father, and The Wild Iris (1992) imagined garden flowers in conversation with a gardener and a deity about the meaning of life. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and cemented her reputation. The 1990s also brought personal hardship, including the end of her second marriage. She wrote through it, publishing the essay collection Proofs & Theories (1994) and Meadowlands (1996), a book about love and the deterioration of a marriage. She taught at Williams College and at Yale University, and in 2004 she published October, a sequence of poems written after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which draws on ancient Greek myth to explore trauma and suffering.

Her work is known for its austerity and precision, and for a sober, direct emotional register. The Nobel committee praised her unmistakable poetic voice, which with austere beauty makes individual existence universal. Her legacy lies in her many readers and in the poets who have followed her, and in the continuing presence of her books in classrooms and anthologies.