Louise Glück, Nobel Prize-winning American poet, dies at 80
Louise Glück, one of America’s most celebrated poets, who plumbed the depths of human experience with sensitivity and precision en route to winning the Nobel Prize in literature, has died. She was 80.Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, confirmed her death to the Associated Press on Friday. Additional details were not immediately available.Across her half-century career, Ms. Glück wrote about childhood, family, loneliness and death, drawing inspiration from ancient mythology as well as her own life. She received virtually all of America’s top literary honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for her 1993 collection “The Wild Iris,” and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020 “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”“Glück’s language is staunchly straightforward, remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech,” critic and editor Wendy Lesser wrote in The Washington Post in 1985, reviewing Ms. Glück’s collection “The Triumph of Achilles,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. “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.”