Louise Glück

Origins and early life

Louise Elisabeth Glück was born in New York City on 22 April 1943 and raised on Long Island, the elder of two surviving daughters of Daniel Glück, a businessman, and Beatrice Grosby. Her mother was of Russian Jewish descent; her paternal grandparents, Terézia Moskovitz and Henrik Glück, were Hungarian Jews from Érmihályfalva who emigrated in December 1900 and kept a grocery in New York. Her father had wanted to be a writer, went into business instead, and with his brother-in-law invented the X-Acto knife; her parents taught her Greek myth and the life of Joan of Arc when she was small, and she began writing verse early.

Work and career

As a teenager she developed anorexia nervosa, which she later called the defining challenge of those years and connected to a wish to assert herself against her mother; she was taken out of school to be treated, spent seven years in analysis and credited it with teaching her how to think. She therefore never took a degree, studying instead in poetry workshops at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia under Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz.

The poems that followed are short, plain and merciless, using Persephone, Dido and the garden as instruments for looking at family, loss and survival without consolation.

Recognition

She published more than a dozen collections, won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004, and received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature for a voice that makes individual existence universal. She died on 13 October 2023.