Nobel laureate Louise Glück, a poet of unblinking candor and perception who wove classical allusions, philosophical reveries, bittersweet memories, and humorous asides into indelible portraits of a fallen and heartrending world. She was 80, per the AP. Over more than 60 years of published work, Glück forged a narrative of trauma, disillusion, stasis and longing, spelled by moments—but only moments—of ecstasy and contentment. In awarding her the literature prize in 2020, the first time an American poet had been honored since TS Eliot in 1948, Nobel judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."
Glück's poems were often brief, a page or less in length, exemplars of her attachment to "the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence." Influenced by Shakespeare, Greek mythology, and Eliot, 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." In some ways, life for Glück was like a troubled romance—fated for unhappiness, but meaningful because pain was our natural condition—and preferable to what she assumed would follow. "The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last," she once wrote.
She published more than a dozen books of poetry, along with essays and a brief prose fable, Marigold and Rose. She drew upon everything from Penelope's weaving in "The Odyssey" to an unlikely muse, the Meadowlands sports complex, which inspired her to ask: "How could the Giants name/that place the Meadowlands? It has/about as much in common with a pasture/as would the inside of an oven." In 1993, she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris. 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 2003-04 and was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2015 for her "decades of powerful lyric poetry that defies all attempts to label it definitively."
story continues below
Glück taught at schools including Stanford University and Yale. Students would remember her as demanding, not above making someone cry but valued for guiding young people in search of their own voices. "You would hand in something and Louise would find the one line that worked," the poet Claudia Rankine told the AP in 2020. Glück grew up on Long Island, 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, Glück wrote, was the family's "maid-of-all-work moral leader" whose assessment of her writing she looked to above all others. In her youth, Glück suffered from anorexia. She was too frail to become a full-time college student and instead sat in on classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. By her mid-20s, she was publishing poems in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly.
(More
obituary stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
