Louise Gluck, Nobel-winning author who made 'individual existence universal', dies

LouiseGluck, the American poet and 2020 Nobel laureate in literature, has died, a Yale University spokeswoman told AFP on Friday.

Gluck was 80 and died after a prolonged fight with Cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shemost recently taught at Yale Universityas a poetry professor.

Add WION as a Preferred Source

She was the 16th woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

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."

She made 'individual existence universal'

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."

Also watch |Gravitas: Nobel Prize Committee Overlooking Non-Western Achievements?

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.

Her work was known for its emotional intensity, often reflecting on her personal life. Yet by playing on myths and classical motifs, it often spoke to a broader human experience.

"The voices of Dido, Persephone, and Eurydice -- the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed -- are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid," the Swedish Academy said in its citation for her 2020 Nobelprize.

Her collections "The Triumph of Achilles" (1985) and "Ararat" (1990) addressed "almost brutally straightforward images of painful family relations," the jury said, noting that her use of a "deceptively natural tone is striking," with "no trace of poetic ornament."

Gluck was also a "poet of radical change and rebirth," her work often marked by "humor and biting wit," the jury added.

After dropping out of college and surviving a failed first marriage, Gluck began to find her feet with her first collection of poems in 1968, "Firstborn."

With her second marriage, she found more stability, returning to her studies and eventually landing a teaching job at Goddard College in Vermont.

In a 2012 interview, she credited psychoanalysis with teaching her how to think.

She described writing poetry as "often a torment, a place of suffering, harrowing" before "a kind of tranquility" sets in after having completed a piece.

(With inputs from agencies)

WATCH WION LIVE HERE

You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us here.