In 2020, Louise Gluck became the first American poet to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since TS Eliot, over seventy years earlier.
Her most renowned poem, "Mock Orange," questions the worth of love and sex, and also borders on trauma and disillusion.
On Friday, her publishers revealed her passing to the public.
"Louise Gluck's poetry gives voice to our untrusting but unstillable need for knowledge and connection in an often unreliable world," her longtime editor Jonathan Galassi said in a statement. "Her work is immortal."
The New York Times was informed by a friend that she had passed away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, due to cancer.
Glück was the US poet laureate from 2003 to 2004 and most recently worked as a professor of English at Yale University and a professor of poetry at Stanford University.
She won about every honour that an American poet could hope to win.
According to the Nobel committee in 2020, "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal" won her the award.
In 1993, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems titled The Wild Iris. These poems explored themes of suffering, death, and rebirth.
She has also been awarded the National Book Award (2014), the Wallace Stevens Award (2008), the National Book Award (2014), and the National Humanities Medal (2015).
Originally from New York, Glück (pronounced "Glick") wrote over a dozen collections of poetry throughout her lifetime.
Her writings were brief—often no more than a page long—and dealt with the harrowing aspects of human existence, such as death, childhood, and family.
She was additionally inspired by the many female victims of betrayal in Greek mythology, such as Persephone and Eurydice.
After dropping out of college and going through her first of two divorces, she published her first book, Firstborn, in 1968.
Her father, co-creator of the X-Acto knife, always encouraged her to put her thoughts on paper. However, she had a tough upbringing that included hospitalization for anorexia.
In one interview from 2006, she reflected on her childhood, saying, "My interactions with the world as a social being were unnatural, forced, performances and I was happiest reading."
