Louise Gluck, US poet and 2020 Nobel laureate, dies at 80

AFP :
American poet Louise Gluck, winner of the Nobel prize for her distinctively austere writing that touched on themes of mythology and the universal human experience, has died, a Yale University spokeswoman told AFP on Friday. She was 80.

The New York native most recently taught at Yale as a poetry professor.

She died of cancer, The New York Times reported, citing friend and former Yale colleague Richard Deming, on Friday at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Gluck was the 2020 Nobel laureate in literature, the 16th woman to win the award.

Her idols included other winners of the same prize, such as William Butler Yeats (1923) and T.S. Eliot (1948).

Like theirs, the austerity of her poetry was a source of strength: “The unsaid, for me, exerts great power,” she wrote in a collection of essays on poetry, “Proofs and Theories.”

“Louise Gluck’s poetry gives voice to our untrusting but unstillable need for knowledge and connection in an often unreliable world,” her longtime editor Jonathan Galassi said in a statement.

Gluck’s work was informed by subjects such as nature’s simple beauty and a child’s experience of the world, coupled with the bold storylines of mythology.

Her 2020 Nobel prize, which she received at home when the ceremony was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, honored her for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection “The Wild Iris,” Gluck became a professor despite never finishing college herself.

She grew up in Long Island, New York, the descendant on her father’s side of Hungarian Jews who emigrated in the early 20th century.

She was also the winner of a National Book Award in 2014 for her collection “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” and served as the US Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004.