Louise Glück, who has died aged 80, was a poet of sharp directness and sometimes dark observation. She won the 2020 Nobel prize for literature, the first American poet to do so since TS Eliot in 1948. Announcing the award, the Swedish Academy praised the way her poetry’s “austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
In her acceptance speech, Glück referred to both Eliot and Emily Dickinson, explaining how she felt “drawn to poems of intimate selection or collusion, poems to which the listener or reader made an essential contribution”.
When Eliot wrote “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table …”, she said, “Eliot is not summoning the boy scout troop. He is asking something of the reader.” She recalled how when she read Dickinson saying “I’m a nobody. Are you nobody, too? Then there is a pair of us – don’t tell!”, she felt as if Dickinson had chosen her.
Glück’s own poetry began very much in the confessional style of John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, and could echo their depression, but she could also create a poetic landscape that made her work seem almost visionary. Her other prime influence was the psychotherapy she underwent as a teenager suffering from anorexia, which she credited with teaching herhow to think about herself and others. It would not be unreasonable to look at much of her work as constructing a framework for understanding and explaining life – full of love, loss and betrayal.
Glück was born in New York City, but grew up on Long Island. Her father, David Glück, was a businessman (and frustrated poet) who, along with his brother-in-law, invented the X-Acto craft knife. Her mother, Beatrice (nee Grosby), a graduate of Wellesley, one of the leading US women’s colleges, was a housewife, and had lost a first daughter before Louise was born. Louise felt neglected by her mother, which spawned a rivalry with her younger sister, Tereze, and a memory from her 1990 collection, Descending Figure.
Far away my sister is moving in her crib.
The dead ones are like that,
always the last to quiet.Because, however long they lie in the earth,
they will not learn to speak
but remain uncertainly pressing against the wooden bars,
so small the leaves hold them down
Both parents encouraged her intellectual curiosity: Glück told the Swedish Academy that at the age of five or six she held a competition to decide the “greatest poem in the world”. The finalists were William Blake’s The Little Black Boy and Stephen Foster’s Swanee River. She told how the myths of her childhood reading were filled with competitions, and “later I began to understand the dangers and limitations of hierarchical thinking, but in my childhood it seemed important to confer a prize”.
She began therapy for her anorexia in her final year of high school. Too frail to go off to college, she took non-degree classes in New York, at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, where she studied under the poets Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz.
Glück worked as a secretary while writing in her spare time; her first poem was published in Mademoiselle magazine; soon she was appearing in the New Yorker. Her first collection, Firstborn, was published in 1968; after publication she experienced writers’ block, which she did not overcome until she began teaching at the experimental Goddard College, which began her lifelong love affair with Vermont. Her first book had been seen as somewhat derivative, but with her next, The House on Marshland (1975), she began to attract acclaim.
Her fully formed style emerged in The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which won the National Book Critics Circle award. Its melding of the personal and mythological became her trademark, and made this a telling meditation on mortality. Ararat (1990) dealt with the death of her father, and how she coped with it, and she won the Pulitzer prize for The Wild Iris (1992), which is a series of discussions between two plants and God.
Glück’s first marriage, to Charles Hertz, whom she met at Columbia, ended in divorce. In 1977 she married John Dranow, who had been director of the Goddard writing programme. She helped him found the New England Culinary Institute, a cookery school in Montpelier, Vermont; following their contentious divorce in 1996, he was forced out of his post there.
The split became the heart of her collection Meadowlands (1996), built from the Odyssey around Penelope’s marriage to Odysseus, a dissecting of a woman’s love and disappointment that becomes simultaneously mythic and mundane, like any marriage under pressure, the convergence of personal dream and epic tale.
In Vita Nova (1999), which won the Bollingen prize, she again dealt with the breakup of her second marriage, mixing myth and dream, while in Averno (2006) she used the myth of Persephone to address issues of isolation and oblivion.
In 2003-04 Glück was poet laureate of the US. In 2014 she won the National Book award for her collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, and in 2016 the Los Angeles Times Book award for her collected Poems 1962-2012. She published two collections of essays, Proofs and Theories (1994), which won a PEN award, and American Originality (2017), and in 2022 published Marigolds and Roses: A Fiction. She taught at Williams College, and Yale and Stanford universities.
In her 2012 poem Afterword, Glück looked back on her art and life, and fate, mixing Kant and Jacques Brel, seeing a chaos that her artist’s brush cannot paint. The poem ends:
I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert
stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems)
on all sides, shifting as I speak,so that I was constantly
face to face with blankness, that
stepchild of the sublime,which, it turns out,
has been both my subject and my medium.
(...)
The mist had cleared. The empty canvases
were turned inward against the wall.The little cat is dead (so the song went).
Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks.
And the sun says yes.
And the desert answers
your voice is sand scattered in wind.
Glück is survived by a son, Noah, from her second marriage.
• Louise Elisabeth Glück, poet and writer, born 22 April 1943; died 13 October 2023
