Louise Glück, an American poet noted for her raw portrayals of the human experience and a senior lecturer in the College’s English department from 1984 to 2004, died of cancer at her home in Cambridge, Mass., on Friday. She was 80.
Former colleagues, friends, and students of Glück’s told the Record that they remember her as an insightful critic of poetry, an inspirational mentor and teacher, and a compassionate friend.
Glück wrote 12 books of poetry, including Faithful and Virtuous Night, which won the National Book Award in 2014. Much of her poetry centered around human relationships, of both familial and romantic natures, and was unified by themes of grief and loss.
She received numerous awards for her work, including the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Wild Iris, and an honorary doctorate from the College in 1993. She was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate in 2003.
“She would find the crux of what was interesting in any poem and then ask questions that would further open it for you and make you want to see what else it had to say,” said Sally Ball ’90, a former student of Glück’s who is now a poet and a professor of English at Arizona State University. “She was just so profoundly articulate, challenging, loving, and clear — and it was so nourishing to be in those conversations with her.”
Ball remembered finding a set of books in her off-campus apartment on Hoxsey Street, left behind by another one of Glück’s students who had filled each book with verbatim transcriptions of Glück’s analysis. “Most of us write notes in a book, but this guy had written ‘she says,’ and then these long transcripts of Louise’s thoughts,” she recalled.
“All the books were full of notes that were entranced in Louise’s way of reading.”
Professor of English Anita Sokolsky, a friend and colleague of Glück’s, remembered the acuity of her responses to poetic work. “She had an extraordinary capacity to be both unsparing in her critiques of people’s writing and extremely generous simultaneously,” Sokolsky said. “There was something very unremitting about the way in which she thought about language… She was incredibly vital, imaginative, and fun to be with.”
Ball also recalled Glück’s reputation for rigorous critiques of her students’ work. Though some perceived Glück as harsh, Ball said she felt honored by Glück’s honesty. “She just [took] you incredibly seriously,” she said. “For me, that was so flattering that it didn’t hurt. That extension of curiosity and seriousness to the student was her enormous strength as a teacher.”
Associate Professor of English Jessica Fisher first met Glück in an editorial context when Glück selected Fisher’s book for the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize. “She was a remarkable poet and a remarkable, clear-sighted editor of other people’s work,” she said. “It’s not a skill everyone has — to be able to piece together manuscripts — but each of her own books is just a jewel… She was able to see shape between works as well as shape within individual poems.”
“[Glück] was a remarkable poet,” Sokolsky said. “It felt as if what she was writing could not have been said in any other way.”
Sokolsky emphasized the precision and depth of Glück’s work. “The spareness of her language was the result of such honed and compressed thought that it just radiated the psychical and emotive aspects of the experience she was describing — there was always the sense that she was attending to the resonances of her thoughts in every line of her poetry,” she said. “She had a very compact sense of when a poem was over, and she was quite assiduous about omitting anything that felt inessential.”
Fisher noted the significance of the long stretches of time during which Glück did not publish work. “Louise was famous for the long periods of time when she wouldn’t write — this sort of fallow between books,” she said. “In that time, poetry was kept close to her through the work of teaching and editing.”
Sokolsky added that Glück’s poetry benefitted from her “amazing patience.”
“She was completely unwilling to repeat what she had done in one book in the next,” Sokolsky said. “She described to me sitting for hours and hours a day, waiting for something to come.”
Ball stressed Glück’s influence on her own teaching practices — a realization she had a few years ago that when the two met at Glück’s home in California to discuss a manuscript of Ball’s poems. “I was sort of having an out-of-body experience, because I thought, ‘Oh, my God, so much of how I talk to my students is how she’s talking to me right now,’” she recalled.
Fisher and Sokolsky said they remember Glück as a good friend and an avid gardener.
“She was impressively acute about recognizing and appreciating the qualities of people, characteristics that were quite different from her own,” Sokolsky said.
“She had a love for life,” Fisher said. “I remember her showing me her garden in Cambridge, where she planted mostly white flowers — it was an ethereal, beautiful space.” Glück’s love of horticulture was incorporated into her poetic work. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning book of poems The Wild Iris was set in a garden and one of its three narrative voices was that of a gardener-poet.
Fisher said she plans to organize a memorial event for Glück at the College in the near future and will share details with the community once they are finalized.
