Louise Gluck in her 2020 Nobel Prize acceptance speech cited the influence of Emily Dickinson.
Gluck, who died of cancer Oct. 13 at age 80 in Cambridge, Mass., said that she was drawn to Dickinson and T.S. Eliot's "poems of intimate selection or collusion, poems to which the listener or reader made an essential contribution."
After Gluck won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I turned to her collected poems, finding that they possessed Dickinson's quiet intimacy, a precision in expressing a range of emotional registers.
Gluck's fascination with nature and the significance of daily experience reminded me of Robert Frost.
In her Nobel talk, Gluck recalled Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock." Gluck, who suffered from anorexia as an adolescent, like Eliot explored the human personality's interior search for meaning.
Gluck's death brought an outpouring of tributes and remembrances from fellow poets and those who'd been her students.
Like Dickinson, Frost and Eliot, Gluck revealed universal feelings with elegance and common but profound language. Her poems will speak to new generations.
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