Washington: American poet Louise Gluck, winner of the Nobel prize for her distinctively austere writing that touched on themes of mythology and the universal human experience, has died, a Yale University spokeswoman told AFP on Friday. She was 80.

The New York native most recently taught at Yale as a poetry professor. She died of cancer, The New York Times reported, citing friend and former Yale colleague Richard Deming, on Friday at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Gluck was the 2020 Nobel laureate in literature, the 16th woman to win the award. Her idols included other winners of the same prize, such as William Butler Yeats (1923) and T.S. Eliot (1948).

Like theirs, the austerity of her poetry was a source of strength: "The unsaid, for me, exerts great power," she wrote in a collection of essays on poetry, "Proofs and Theories."

"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."

Gluck's work was informed by subjects such as nature's simple beauty and a child's experience of the world, coupled with the bold storylines of mythology. Her 2020 Nobel prize, which she received at home when the ceremony was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, honored her for "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection "The Wild Iris," Gluck became a professor despite never finishing college herself.

"The voices of Dido, Persephone, and Eurydice -- the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed -- are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid," the Swedish Academy said in its citation for her 2020 Nobel prize.