The American poet Louise Glück, crowned with the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at the age of 80, her publishing house and the prestigious Yale University at which she taught confirmed to AFP on Friday.
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This native of New York, considered one of the greatest figures in American poetry, had been rewarded “ for his characteristic poetic voice » by the Swedish Academy in 2020, becoming the 16th woman to win this literature prize.
“ Louise Glück’s poetry gives voice to our unquenchable thirst for knowledge and connection in an often unreliable world. His work is immortal », greeted its historic publisher Jonathan Galassi of Farrar, Straus and Giroux in a press release to AFP.
His work, begun in the late 1960s and famous for its fluid style and its sublimation of the simple beauty of nature, has earned him numerous prestigious awards in the United States. His polyphonic collection The Wild Iris (Wild Irislate translated into French), published in 1992, for example earned him the Pulitzer Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the world.
Accessible poetry
In more than 50 years, the author has published around ten collections of poetry, essays and a novel. The latter, entitled Marigold and Rose: A fiction (2022) offers an incandescent dive into the inner lives of very different twins.
Even dedicated to the confidentiality that our era reserves for free verse, his poetry has remained very accessible. It does without any critical explanatory apparatus, and Louise Glück’s English can be read without too much difficulty, provided that one has some knowledge of this language.
A fan of simplicity, Louise Glück cited poets known for their clarity of expression, William Butler Yeats (Nobel Prize 1923) and TS Eliot (Nobel Prize 1948), as her first youthful influences.
Besides nature, the great source of inspiration lay in his childhood. “ I was a lonely child. My interactions with the world as a social being were unnatural, forced, representations, and I was happiest when I was reading. Well, it wasn’t entirely as sublime as that, I watched a lot of TV and ate a lot too “, she said thus.
His Germanic surname came from Jewish grandparents from Hungary who emigrated to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. She herself was born in 1943 in New York, into a family who encouraged her to express her creativity.
(With AFP)