When former Vermont State Poet Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, she avoided interviews and, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, accepted the $1 million award privately at home.
Glück let her writing speak for itself.
Then again, the onetime Goddard College teacher occasionally shared a thought or two, even when declining a request for an interview.
“Vermont remains the place where my heart is,” she emailed a VTDigger reporter in 2020.
The 80-year-old’s reticence for the spotlight and reverence for the state continued right up to Friday, when her editor reported her death without elaboration in a simple confirmation to the Associated Press.
Glück (the name is pronounced “Glick”) was born in New York in 1943, began writing in her youth and published a debut collection, “Firstborn,” in 1968. She wrestled with another before visiting Goddard College in Plainfield in 1971.
“My writing life at that point was spent sitting in front of a piece of white paper at a typewriter, completely paralyzed,” she recalled in the American Academy of Achievement podcast “What It Takes.” “The minute I got to Vermont, I thought, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be.’ It was one of the most dramatic, transformative experiences of my life. I started writing with a fluency that I had never experienced.”
Glück joined Goddard’s faculty, married and gave birth to a son, only to divorce two decades later. But the personal struggles led to further professional success.
“I write to discover meaning,” she told the “What It Takes” podcast. “Nothing should be wasted. Something must come of it. And writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance. Bad luck, loss, pain — if you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.”
Glück went on to work at several other schools, write more than a dozen books and win such appointments and awards as Vermont state poet from 1994 to 1998, U.S. poet laureate from 2003 to 2004 and a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2016.
She most recently taught at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Richard Deming, a friend and former colleague there, told the New York Times she had cancer.
Glück won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” selectors said.
The Nobel Committee noted Glück’s then 12 poetry collections, including 1992’s “The Wild Iris,” a Pulitzer Prize winner that chronicles a New England garden from spring to late summer. Selectors cited the latter anthology’s “Snowdrops,” in which she describes rebirth after winter:
I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring –
afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.
Glück was the third U.S. woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, following Pearl Buck (who lived her last years in Vermont) in 1938 and Toni Morrison in 1993. In acceptance remarks, Glück summed up the award as “choosing to honor the intimate, private voice, which public utterance can sometimes augment or extend, but never replace.”
Glück bought a house in Montpelier with her Nobel winnings. She continued to avoid the press with the publication of her 13th and last collection, 2021’s “Winter Recipes from the Collective.” But reading a VTDigger story about herself, she wasn’t shy to email a correction about her birthplace.
“I suppose my reluctance to be interviewed is responsible for misinformation,” she wrote, “but that’s a longer story.”
