She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal".
Glück is often described as an autobiographical poet; her work is known for its emotional intensity and for frequently drawing on mythology or nature imagery to meditate on personal experiences and modern life.
[28] However, reflecting on it in 2003, the critic Stephanie Burt said the collection "revealed a forceful but clotted poet, an anxious imitator of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath".
[29] Following the publication, Glück experienced a prolonged case of writer's block, which was not cured, she said, until 1971, when she began to teach poetry at Goddard College in Vermont.
[26][30] The poems she wrote during this time were collected in her second book, The House on Marshland (1975), which many critics have regarded as her breakthrough work, signaling her "discovery of a distinctive voice".
[31] In 1973, Glück gave birth to a son, Noah, with her partner, Keith Monley, who helped raise him for the first two years of his life.
[12][32] Her marriage to Charles Hertz, Jr. had ended in divorce, and in 1977 she married John Dranow, an author who had started the summer writing program at Goddard College.
It received some criticism for its tone and subject matter: for example, the poet Greg Kuzma accused Glück of being a "child hater" for her now anthologized poem, "The Drowned Children".
In The American Poetry Review, Mary Kinzie praised the book's illumination of "deprived, harmed, stammering beings".
[27] In the wake of that tragedy, Glück began to write the poems that would later be collected in her award-winning work, The Triumph of Achilles (1985).
Writing in The New York Times, the author and critic Liz Rosenberg described the collection as "clearer, purer, and sharper" than Glück's previous work.
[37] The critic Peter Stitt, writing in The Georgia Review, declared that the book showed Glück to be "among the important poets of our age".
[42] The loss prompted her to begin a new collection of poems, Ararat (1990), the title of which references the mountain of the Genesis flood narrative.
Writing in The New York Times in 2012, the critic Dwight Garner called it "the most brutal and sorrow-filled book of American poetry published in the last 25 years".
Consisting of one poem divided into six parts, it draws on ancient Greek myth to explore aspects of trauma and suffering.
[53] In her Nobel lecture, which was delivered in writing, she highlighted her early engagement with poetry by William Blake and Emily Dickinson in discussing the relationship between poets, readers, and the wider public.
Her younger sister, Tereze (1945–2018), worked at Citibank as a vice president and was also a writer, winning the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 1995 for her book, May You Live in Interesting Times.
[60] The scholar Laura Quinney has argued that her careful use of words put Glück into "the line of American poets who value fierce lyric compression", from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop.
[61] Glück's poems shifted in form throughout her career, beginning with short, terse lyrics composed of compact lines and expanding into connected book-length sequences.
As the scholar Helen Vendler has noted: "In their obliquity and reserve, [Glück's poems] offer an alternative to first-person 'confession', while remaining indisputably personal".
Most prominently, Glück's poetry can be said to focus on trauma, as she wrote throughout her career about death, loss, suffering, failed relationships, and attempts at healing and renewal.
[66] The scholar Daniel Morris notes that even a Glück poem that uses traditionally happy or idyllic imagery "suggests the author's awareness of mortality, of the loss of innocence".
[31] The scholar Joanne Feit Diehl echoes this notion when she argues that "this 'sense of an ending' … infuses Glück's poems with their retrospective power", pointing to her transformation of common objects, such as a baby stroller, into representations of loneliness and loss.
Morris argues that Glück's poems, which often adopt contradictory points of view, reflect "her own ambivalent relationship to status, power, morality, gender, and, most of all, language".
He argues that "Glück's poems at their best have always moved between recoil and affirmation, sensuous immediacy and reflection … for a poet who can often seem earthbound and defiantly unillusioned, she has been powerfully responsive to the lure of the daily miracle and the sudden upsurge of overmastering emotion".
[72] In Ararat, too, "flowers become a language of mourning", useful for both commemoration and competition among mourners to determine the "ownership of nature as a meaningful system of symbolism".
Scholars and critics have pointed to the literary influence on her work of Robert Lowell,[76] Rainer Maria Rilke,[64] and Emily Dickinson,[77] among others.
[115] In 1999, Glück, along with the poets Rita Dove and W. S. Merwin, was asked to serve as a special consultant to the Library of Congress for that institution's bicentennial.
The Yale Series is the oldest annual literary competition in the United States, and during her time as judge, she selected for publication works by the poets Jay Hopler, Peter Streckfus, and Fady Joudah, among others.