Louise Glück, an American poet whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world, won her practically every honor available, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and, in 2020, the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on Friday at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 80.
Her death was confirmed by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Richard Deming, a friend and former colleague of hers in the English department at Yale, said the cause was cancer.
Ms. Glück (pronounced glick) was widely considered to be among the country’s greatest living poets, long before she won the Nobel. She began publishing in the 1960s and received some acclaim in the ’70s, but she cemented her reputation in the ’80s and early ’90s with a string of books, including “Triumph of Achilles” (1985), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; “Ararat” (1990); and “The Wild Iris” (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Her work was both deeply personal — “Ararat,” for example, drew on the pain she experienced over the death of her father — and broadly accessible, both to critics, who praised her clarity and precise lyricism, and to the broader reading public. She served as the United States poet laureate from 2003 to 2004.
“‘Direct’ is the operative word here,” the critic Wendy Lesser wrote in a review of “Triumph of Achilles” in The Washington Post. ”Glück’s language is staunchly straightforward, remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech. Yet her careful selection for rhythm and repetition, and the specificity of even her idiomatically vague phrases, give her poems a weight that is far from colloquial.”
Her early work, especially her debut, “Firstborn” (1968), is deeply indebted to the so-called confessional poets who dominated the scene in the 1950s and ’60s, among them John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.
But even as Ms. Glück continued to weave her verse with an autobiographical thread, there is nothing solipsistic in her later, more mature work, even as she explored intimate themes of trauma and heartbreak.
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