Louise Glück
By 
The Nobel Prize-winning poet has died:
Louise Glück, an American poet whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world, won her practically every honor available, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and, in 2020, the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on Friday at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 80.
Her death was confirmed by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Richard Deming, a friend and former colleague of hers in the English department at Yale, said the cause was cancer.
Ms. Glück (pronounced glick) was widely considered to be among the country’s greatest living poets, long before she won the Nobel. She began publishing in the 1960s and received some acclaim in the ’70s, but she cemented her reputation in the ’80s and early ’90s with a string of books, including “Triumph of Achilles” (1985), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; “Ararat” (1990); and “The Wild Iris” (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet
incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious
ruler uniting all of a divided country—so I was told by the fortune-teller
who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps
behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference?
Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the
rest is hypothesis and dream.