The Nobel-winning poet of trauma and linguistic precision

Louise Glück 1943–2023

Louise Glück’s poetry was unadorned and unflinching. In a six-decade career, she published 14 volumes of verse that used spare, direct language to explore themes of loss, disillusionment, and heartbreak. But her poems were also leavened by flashes of humor and the occasional flight of rapture. Influenced by Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and Greek mythology, and devoted to “the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence,” Glück won every major honor available to a poet. The Wild Iris (1992) won a Pulitzer, Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014) a National Book Award. In 2020, she won the Nobel Prize in literature; the committee praised “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” She grew up on Long Island, said The New York Times, with a homemaker mother and a businessman father who helped invent the X-Acto knife. “An intensely intellectual child,” she became an “intensely selfcritical” teen who struggled with anorexia and embarked on years of psychoanalysis. Though too delicate to go to college, she took a few poetry classes at Columbia University, where she studied under Stanley Kunitz. By the mid-1960s, “she was working as a secretary by day and writing poetry in her free time.” Her first book of verses, Firstborn, came out when she was 25. “Years of writer’s block” followed, said The Guardian. Even after her second book, The House on Marshland, was published in 1975 “to breakthrough literary success,” she continued to find writing a struggle. But she eventually taught poetry at universities, including Stanford and Yale, and said that nurturing other students helped. “Always I am someone longing to be a poet, to make something never heard before, to be taken out of myself,” she wrote in 2020. “That it happened at all is a wonder.”