NEW YORK (AP) — Nobel laureate Louise Glück, a poet of unblinking candor and perception who wove classical allusions, philosophical reveries, bittersweet memories and humorous asides into indelible portraits of a fallen and heartrending world, has died at 80.
Glück’s death was confirmed Friday by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She died of cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to her publisher. A former student of Glück’s, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham, said that the author had only recently been diagnosed.
“I find it very much like her that she only learned she had cancer a few days before dying from it,” Graham said. “Her whole sensibility — both on and off the page — was cut that close to the spine of time.”
In a career spanning more than 60 years, Glück forged a narrative of trauma, disillusion, stasis and longing, spelled by moments — but only moments — of ecstasy and contentment. In awarding her the literature prize in 2020, the first time an American poet had been honored since T.S. Eliot in 1948, Nobel judges praised “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Glück’s poems were often brief, a page or less in length, exemplars of her attachment to “the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence.” Influenced by Shakespeare, Greek mythology and Eliot among others, she questioned and at times dismissed outright the bonds of love and sex, what she called the “premise of union” in her most famous poem, “Mock Orange.” In some ways, life for Glück was like a troubled romance — fated for unhappiness, but meaningful because pain was our natural condition — and preferable to what she assumed would follow.
“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last,” she once wrote.
In her poem “Summer,” the narrator addresses her husband and remembers “the days of our first happiness,” when everything seemed to have “ripened.”
Then the circles closed. Slowly the nights grew cool;
the pendant leaves of the willow
yellowed and fell. And in each of us began
a deep isolation, though we never spoke of this,
of the absence of regret.
We were artists again, my husband.
We could resume the journey.
Poet Tracy K. Smith, a Pulitzer winner, said in a statement Friday that Glück’s poetry had “saved” her many times.
“I think constantly of these lines from ‘The Wild Iris’: ‘At the end of my suffering / there was a door.’ And of these lines from ‘The House on Marshland’: ‘The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.’ It is as if her spare, patient syntax forms a path into and through the weight of living,” she wrote.
Glück published more than a dozen books of poetry, along with essays and a brief prose fable, “Marigold and Rose.” She drew upon everything from Penelope’s weaving in “The Odyssey” to an unlikely muse, the Meadowlands sports complex, which inspired her to ask: “How could the Giants name/that place the Meadowlands? It has/about as much in common with a pasture/as would the inside of an oven.”
In 1993, she won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Wild Iris,” an exchange in part between a beleaguered gardener and a callous deity. “What is my heart to you/that you must break it over and over,” the gardener wonders. The god answers: “My poor inspired creation ... You are/too little like me in the end/to please me.”
“I’ve always had this sort of magical-thinking way of detesting my previous books as a way of pushing myself forward,” she told the Washington Square Review in 2015. “And I realized that I had this feeling of sneaking-up pride in accomplishment. Sometimes I would just stack my books together and think, ‘Wow, you haven’t wasted all your time.’ But then I was very afraid because it was a completely new sensation, that pride, and I thought, ‘Oh, this means really bad things.’”
