One of the most honored poets of her generation, Glück received the National Book Award for Poetry in 2014 for “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” the National Humanities Medal from then-President Barack Obama in 2015, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection “The Wild Iris,” and numerous other awards.
The Nobel Prize committee that awarded her the prize remarked that her writing “makes individual existence universal,” a common compliment.
Louis Gluck Death
Louise Glück, an esteemed American poet and Nobel laureate in literature, passed away on January 18 at the age of 80. In 2020, she became the first American poet to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since TS Eliot, over seventy years prior. Her most renowned poem, “Mock Orange,” questions the worth of love and s*x and is filled with trauma and disappointment. On Friday, her publishers revealed her passing to the public.
Rest In Peace Louise Glück, 1943–2023. “Louise Glück’s poetry gives voice to our untrusting but unstillable need for knowledge and connection in an often unreliable world. Her work is immortal.” (Jonathan Galassi, FSG’s Chairman and Executive Editor) pic.twitter.com/HL47JFip1r
— Farrar,Straus&Giroux (@fsgbooks) October 13, 2023
“Louise Gluck’s poetry gives voice to our untrusting but unstillable need for knowledge and connection in an often unreliable world,” her longtime editor Jonathan Galassi said in a statement. “Her work is immortal.”
A friend reported her death from cancer at her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to The New York Times.
Louis Gluck Career
Previously a professor of English at Yale and of poetry at Stanford, Glück served as US poet laureate from 2003 to 2004. She won nearly every major American poetry award there is. According to the Nobel Committee in 2020, “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal” won the award.
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In 1993, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection The Wild Iris, which explored themes of loss, death, and rebirth. She has also been recognized with the National Book Award in 2014, the National Humanities Medal from Barack Obama in 2015, and the Wallace Stevens Award for Poetry from 2001.
Originally from New York, Glück (pronounced “Glick”) wrote over a dozen collections of poetry throughout her lifetime. Her writings were brief—often no more than a page long—and dealt with the harrowing aspects of human existence, such as death, childhood, and family.
She was also influenced by the many female victims of betrayal in Greek mythology, such as Persephone and Eurydice. After dropping out of college and going through her first of two divorces, she published her first book, Firstborn, in 1968.
Her father, co-creator of the X-Acto knife, always encouraged her to put her ideas on paper. However, she had a troubled upbringing that included hospitalization for anorexia.
In one interview from 2006, she reflected on her childhood, saying, “My interactions with the world as a social being were unnatural, forced, performances and I was happiest reading.”
