Louise Glück

Louise Elisabeth Glück (April 22, 1943 – October 13, 2023) was an American poet. She won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her book The Wild Iris and National Book Award of Poetry in 2014 for her book Faithful and Virtuous Night. She was the United States Poet Laureate in 2003. In 2020, she was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Early life
Glück was born and raised in New York City. As a teenager, Glück had anorexia. She had psychoanalysis treatment done to help her with the illness. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and at Columbia University.

While attending poetry workshops in college, Glück began to publish her poems. Her first publication was in Mademoiselle, followed soon after by poems in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and other venues.

After leaving Columbia, Glück was a private secretary.

Career
In 1968, Glück published her first collection of poems, Firstborn. Many critics liked it. However some said she was trying to copy Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath". Following the publication, Glück had a long case of writer's block, which was not cured, she said, until 1971, when she began to teach poetry at Goddard College in Vermont. The poems she wrote during this time were collected in her second book, The House on Marshland (1975).

In 1980, Glück's third collection, Descending Figure, was published. It received some criticism for its tone and subject matter, with some saying the poem was about hating children. However some critics did like it. That same year, a fire destroyed Glück's house in Vermont, resulting in the loss of most of her things.

After the fire, Glück began to write the poems that would later be in her award-winning work, The Triumph of Achilles (1985). Many critics liked this work with some calling it "sharper" than her other works. One critic called her "among the important poets of our age" and made her a popular poet. From the collection, the poem "Mock Orange", has been popular with feminists.

In 1984, Glück began working with Williams College in Massachusetts. Her next collection of poems, Ararat (1990), talked about loss since it was written after her father died. Glück followed this collection with one of her most popular books, The Wild Iris (1992), which talked about the meaning of life. It was well liked by critics with some calling it "a milestone work". It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, making Glück's a popular American poet.

In 1994, she published a collection of essays called Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry. She then created Meadowlands (1996), a collection of poetry about love and failing marriages. She followed it with two more collections: Vita Nova (1999) and The Seven Ages (2001).

In 2004, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Glück published a chapbook entitled October. It was one poem divided into six parts and was about ancient Greek myth to explore parts of trauma and suffering. That same year, she began working with Yale University.

Glück continued to publish poetry while working at Yale. She would go on to publish Averno (2006), A Village Life (2009), and Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). In 2012, a collection of her poems during her fifty-year career, entitled Poems: 1962–2012, was published. Another collection of her essays, titled American Originality, was released in 2017.

In October 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the sixteenth female literature laureate since the prize was founded in 1901. She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature since Toni Morrison in 1993 and the first American poet to be honored since T. S. Eliot in 1948. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she received her prize at her home.

In 2021, Glück's collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective, was published. In 2022, she was promoted at Yale. In 2023, she was made a professor of English at Stanford University.

Personal life
Glück married Charles Hertz Jr. in 1967, however the marriage ended in divorce. In 1973, Glück gave birth to a son, Noah, with her partner, Keith Monley, however their relationship ended in 1975. From 1977 until their divorce in 1996, she was married to John Dranow.

Glück's niece is the actress Abigail Savage.

Glück died from cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 13, 2023, at the age of 80.

Bibliography
Poetry
Firstborn (1968)
The House on Marshland (1975)
The Garden (1976)
Descending Figure (1980)
The Triumph of Achilles (1985)
Ararat (1990)
The Wild Iris (1992)
Mock Orange (1993)
The First Four Books of Poems (1995)
Meadowlands (1997)
Vita Nova (1999)
The Seven Ages (2001)
Averno (2006)
A Village Life (2009) (shortlisted for the 2010 International Griffin Poetry Prize)

Prose
Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994)

 Related pages 
List of poets from North America
List of poets from the United States

References

Other websites
 Louise Glück at poets.org
 Louise Glück: Online Resources from the Library of Congress

Category:1943 births
Category:2023 deaths
Category:American Nobel Prize winners
Category:American poets
Category:Columbia University alumni
Category:Jewish American academics
Category:Jewish American writers
Category:Jewish Nobel Prize winners
Category:Pulitzer Prize winners
Category:Writers from New York City
Category:Educators from New York City
Category:Cancer deaths in Massachusetts
Category:Writers from Vermont
Category:Educators from Vermont
Category:American essayists
Category:People with anorexia
Category:Nobel Prize in Literature winners