Louise luck
The Pulitzer Prize winner and former American poet was known for her sharp, rigorous lyrical work
Louise Glück, the Nobel Prize-winning author and former poet of the United States, has died at the age of 80.
Her death was confirmed to the Associated Press on Friday by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Glück, a poet of incisive openness and often sadness, who worked in allusions to classical mythology amid memories and philosophical insights, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020.
The Nobel Prize judges praised “her distinctive poetic voice, which with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Her poems, often one-page or less brutally sharp, demonstrated her commitment to “the unspoken, to intimations, to eloquent, deliberate silences.”
“She never stops making demands on herself”: How the US poet Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize
A native of New York, Glück published more than a dozen books of poetry over the course of her life, as well as essays and a short prose fable, Marigold and Rose. Her work was heavily influenced by classical mythology, including Shakespeare and Eliot.
In 1993, she received the Pulitzer Prize for “Wild Iris,” a volume of poetry that explored the themes of suffering, death and rebirth. Other works include the collections The Seven Ages, The Triumph of Achilles, Vita Nova and the anthology Poems 1962-2012.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Glück has received numerous other literary awards, including the Bollingen Lifetime Achievement Prize in 2001, the 2014 National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, and the 2015 National Humanities Medal for her “decades of powerful poetry that defies all attempts.” “. to mark it definitively.”
She was also the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004 and taught generations of aspiring writers at institutions such as Stanford and Yale.
Born on April 22, 1943 in New York City, Glück was descended from Eastern European Jews and grew up on Long Island. Her father, Daniel Glück, was a businessman who is partly credited with inventing the X-Acto knife; her mother, Beatrice Glück, was a housewife.
She developed an interest in poetry at a young age, but her later education was derailed by anorexia nervosa, which consumed much of her youth and early 20s. Too frail to attend college, Glück took courses at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, where she found mentors in poetry teachers Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz.
She later owed her life – and her ability to write – to seven years of intensive psychoanalysis in her twenties. “Analysis taught me how to think. “Taught me to use my tendency to object to articulate ideas about my own ideas, taught me to use doubt and examine my own language for its evasions and excisions,” she recalled during a 1989 lecture at the Guggenheim Museum. “The longer I withheld the conclusion, the more I saw. I think I learned to write, too.” By her mid-20s, she was publishing poems in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines.
Her first book of poetry, Firstborn, was published in 1968 and preceded years of writer’s block; Her second book, The House on Marshland, was published in 1975 and was a groundbreaking literary success. Subsequent works, including The Wild Iris and Ararat, became testaments to creative reinvention and challenge. “The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is perceptive enough, can endure,” she once wrote.
Glück was married and divorced twice, first in 1967 to Charles Hertz Jr. and in 1977 to John Dranow, with whom she had a son, Noah.
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