A Jewish family on Long Island
Louise Elisabeth Glück was born in New York City on 22 April 1943. She was the second child of Daniel and Beatrice Glück but, as she wrote, the first to survive: an elder sister had died before she was born, a loss that would echo through her poetry. Her paternal grandparents, Henrik and Terézia Glück, were Hungarian Jews from Érmihályfalva, then in the Kingdom of Hungary and now in Romania, who emigrated to the United States in 1900 and eventually ran a grocery store in New York. Her mother’s family was of Russian Jewish descent and had been American for several generations.
Her father had wanted to be a writer but went into business with his brother-in-law; together they founded X-Acto, adapting surgical blades into the craft knife that became an American household tool. Her mother, a Wellesley graduate, ran the household with great force. When Louise was small the family moved to Woodmere, Long Island, which she described as a prosperous Jewish suburb known for its excellent schools. Her parents read her the Greek myths, and her father’s bedtime story was the life of Joan of Arc.
Illness and the making of a poet
Glück read very early and began writing poems as a child; by sixteen she had finished what she thought of as her first book and sent it to publishers. In her teens she developed anorexia nervosa, which became the defining challenge of her late adolescence. In the middle of her senior year of high school she was taken out of school and began psychoanalysis. She later wrote that the seven years she spent in analysis radically changed the course of her life and made her life possible.
Because of her illness she never enrolled as a full-time college student. Instead she took a poetry class at Sarah Lawrence College and, from 1963 to 1966, workshops at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, where she studied with Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. She called them crucial mentors. She never took a degree, and later became a professor at some of the most selective universities in the country.
Finding a voice
Her first collection, Firstborn, appeared in 1968. It was followed by years of writer’s block that ended, she said, only when she began teaching poetry at Goddard College in Vermont in 1971. The poems of that period became The House on Marshland (1975), which critics regarded as her breakthrough. Descending Figure (1980) followed, and after a fire destroyed her Vermont house that year she wrote the poems of The Triumph of Achilles (1985), whose poem Mock Orange became an anthology piece taught in college courses across the country.
The death of her father prompted Ararat (1990), an unflinching book about a family’s grief; the critic Dwight Garner later called it the most brutal and sorrow-filled book of American poetry in a quarter century. Then came The Wild Iris (1992), in which garden flowers speak to a gardener and to a god about life, death and renewal. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and became one of the most loved books of American poetry of its time.
Grief, myth and the voice of the self
Glück’s poems are spare and exact. She avoided ornament, rhyme and display, and critics placed her in a line of American poets of fierce compression running from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop. Her subjects were the oldest ones: childhood, family, love and its failure, illness, death, and the hope of renewal. She often spoke through masks drawn from classical myth, such as Persephone, Dido, Eurydice and Achilles, so that a private sorrow became, in the Swedish Academy’s phrase, universal.
After her second marriage ended, she wrote Meadowlands (1996), Vita Nova (1999) and The Seven Ages (2001). In response to the attacks of 11 September 2001 she published October, a single poem in six parts that uses Greek myth to explore trauma and survival. Averno (2006) retold the myth of Persephone’s descent into the underworld, and Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014) won the National Book Award. Her collected Poems 1962–2012 was greeted as a literary event, and her last collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective, appeared in 2021.
Teacher and champion of young poets
For half a century Glück was a dedicated teacher. After Goddard she joined Williams College in Massachusetts in 1984, became writer in residence at Yale in 2004 and later the Frederick Iseman Professor in the Practice of Poetry there, and in 2023 joined the creative writing programme at Stanford. She also taught at Boston University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
From 2003 to 2010 she judged the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary competition in the United States, choosing first books by poets including Peter Streckfus, Jay Hopler and Fady Joudah. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003–2004 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and in 1999 she helped the Library of Congress plan its bicentennial. Her two books of essays, Proofs and Theories (1994) and American Originality (2017), are widely read by students of poetry.
Why her poetry matters
Glück’s poems are among the most widely anthologised of her generation, appearing in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the Oxford Book of American Poetry and the Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, and they are taught in classrooms around the world. Readers facing loss, illness or the end of a marriage have found in her work a voice that neither consoles falsely nor turns away, and which insists, as in her poem Snowdrops from The Wild Iris, on the possibility of opening again to the world after a long winter.
Her own story is part of that gift. She was open about her anorexia and her years in psychoanalysis, and about how therapy taught her how to think. Her candour offers an example to anyone struggling with an eating disorder or depression: a person can survive such illness and go on to make lasting art.
Poetry as private conversation
In her Nobel lecture, delivered in writing because of the pandemic, Glück returned to the poets she had loved as a child, William Blake and Emily Dickinson, and reflected on the relationship between a poet, a single reader and the wider public. She was drawn, she explained, to poems that feel like intimate speech addressed to one listener, rather than to poems that speak to crowds. That idea runs through her teaching and her essays: a poem is a private exchange that, at its best, a stranger can overhear and recognise as their own.
Her own route to poetry was solitary. As a teenager she spent afternoons in the public library and summers at music camps, where, she wrote, she was not ostracised and real friendships were made. She read Keats, Dickinson and Yeats obsessively, and she wrote from early childhood with her father’s encouragement; he would transcribe the stories his daughters made up onto folded squares of paper so that they could illustrate them like books. Those early lessons, that writing is a way of speaking to someone you trust, shaped the quiet authority of her mature work.
Nobel Prize and Jewish identity
In October 2020 the Swedish Academy awarded Glück the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Because of the COVID-19 pandemic she received the prize at home. Her honours also included the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bollingen Prize.
Glück resisted being labelled a Jewish-American poet, or any hyphenated kind of poet, and her poetry seldom names ethnic or religious identity. Yet in her Nobel autobiography she recalled an episode from a childhood summer in Paris, when a nun at a convent school took her and her sister to the chapel and told them to kneel and pray to Jesus. She knew, she wrote, that Jews did not bow down before statues, and she did not bow.
Life, death and legacy
Glück married Charles Hertz Jr. in 1967; the marriage ended in divorce. In 1973 she had a son, Noah, with her partner Keith Monley. In 1977 she married the writer John Dranow, a co-founder of the New England Culinary Institute; they divorced in 1996. In later years she divided her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, Montpelier, Vermont, and Berkeley, California. Her papers, including manuscripts and correspondence, are held by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where scholars continue to study how her poems took shape.
Writing ran in the family. Her younger sister Tereze, a vice president at Citibank, was also a writer and won the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 1995; the actress Abigail Savage is Glück’s niece. Throughout her life she remained a close friend and confidant of the Vermont novelist Kathryn Davis, and the two shared their work in progress for decades.
She died of cancer at her home in Cambridge on 13 October 2023, at the age of eighty. She left a body of work that many readers return to in their hardest moments, and generations of poets she taught, edited and published. Her legacy is a poetry of clarity and courage that makes the most private griefs speak for everyone.
Sources & further reading
Louise Glück, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Biobibliography: Louise Glück, NobelPrize.org · Louise Glück, Facts, NobelPrize.org · Louise Glück, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.