Louise Gluck, Nobel-winning poet who explored trauma and loss, dies at 80

Massachusetts – Louise Gluck, an American poet whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world,

won her practically every honour available

, died on Friday at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 80.

Her death was confirmed by Mr Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Dr Richard Deming, a friend and former colleague of hers in the English department at Yale, said the cause was cancer.

Gluck was widely considered to be among the country’s greatest living poets, long before she won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2020.

She began publishing in the 1960s and received some acclaim in the 1970s.

But she cemented her reputation in the 1980s and early 1990s with a string of books, including The Triumph Of Achilles (1985), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Ararat (1990); and The Wild Iris (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Her work was both deeply personal – Ararat, for example, drew on the pain she experienced over the death of her father – and broadly accessible, both to critics, who praised her clarity and precise lyricism, and to the broader reading public.

She served as the US poet laureate from 2003 to 2004.

“‘Direct’ is the operative word here,” critic Wendy Lesser wrote in a review of Triumph Of Achilles in The Washington Post. “Gluck’s language is staunchly straightforward, remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech. Yet her careful selection for rhythm and repetition, and the specificity of even her idiomatically vague phrases, give her poems a weight that is far from colloquial.”

Her early work, especially her debut, Firstborn (1968), is deeply indebted to the so-called confessional poets who dominated the scene in the 1950s and 1960s, among them John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.

But even as Gluck continued to weave her verse with an autobiographical thread, there is nothing solipsistic in her later, more mature work, even as she explored intimate themes of trauma and heartbreak.

“The poets I returned to as I grew older were the poets in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role,” she said in her Nobel acceptance speech. “Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine. Not stadium poets. Not poets talking to themselves.”

With sometimes remorseless wit and razor-sharp language, she seamlessly tied the personal to the social, the particular to the universal, looping together meditations on her own struggles with themes of family, mortality and loss.

In awarding her its prize for literature – she was the first America-born poet to win it since T.S. Eliot in 1948 – the Nobel committee praised her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

“Bleak”, “alienated” and “austere” were all adjectives one got used to finding in reviews of Gluck’s work. “She is at heart the poet of a fallen world,” critic Don Bogen once wrote.

Nature is rarely a thing of beauty in her work; it is full of sadness, danger and disappointment. In what is perhaps her most famous and widely anthologised poem, Mock Orange, she wrote:

We were made fools of.

And the scent of mock orange

drifts through the window.

How can I rest?

How can I be content

when there is still

that odour in the world?

But if her work rarely offered redemption, let alone joy, it did seek solace, if only in the acceptance of the world as it is – Achilles’ triumph, in her view, was his realisation of his own mortality.

And in mortality and death, she felt, one might find the hope of rebirth. In the title poem of The Wild Iris, she wrote, from the flower’s perspective,

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

from the centre of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure sea water.

Louise Elizabeth Gluck was born on April 22, 1943, in New York City and grew up in Cedarhurst, on the South Shore of Long Island.

Her father, Daniel, was a businessman and a frustrated poet who, among other things, helped invent the X-Acto knife. Her mother, Beatrice (Grosby) Gluck, was a housewife.

Louise Gluck was an intensely intellectual child.

In her Nobel lecture, she recalled one evening, when she was about six years old, staying up late debating with herself what the “greatest poem in the world” was and unable to decide between the two finalists: The Little Black Boy by William Blake, and Swanee River by Stephen Foster. (After much back and forth, Blake won.)

“Competitions of this sort, for honour, for high reward, seemed natural to me,” she said. “The myths that were my first reading were filled with them.”

But she was also competitive with herself, and intensely self-critical. She struggled with anorexia as a teenager, dropping to just 75 pounds (34kg) before entering therapy.

“Later I began to understand the dangers and limitations of hierarchical thinking, but in my childhood it seemed important to confer a prize,” she said. “One person would stand at the top of the mountain, visible from far away, the only thing of interest on the mountain.”

Her condition made it hard for her to attend college, although she took classes at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University, where she studied under poets Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz.

By the mid-1960s, she was working as a secretary by day and writing poetry in her free time. Soon, she was getting published in high-profile magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Nation.

Her marriages to Mr Charles Hertz Jr and Mr John Dranow ended in divorce. Survivors include her son, Mr Noah Dranow, and two grandchildren. NYTIMES