Mary Oliver

• Born: September 10, 1935
• Birthplace: Cleveland, Ohio
• Died: January 17, 2019
• Place of death: Hobe Sound, Florida

Other literary forms

Mary Oliver wrote collections of essays: Blue Pastures (1995) and Winter Hours (1999). Although the essays are mainly prose meditations, some are written in poetic form. The subject matter is often the creation of poetry, by Oliver herself or by poets who have influenced her. Blue Pastures celebrates the creative power of imagination, its capacity to reorder circumstances and to enter the natural world to find comfort, community, and joy. The meditations center on ponds, trees, animals, and seasons and on Romantic writers who looked to nature: Walt Whitman, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, in whose house Oliver lived periodically for several years after college, serving as an assistant to Millay’s sister.

Winter Hours takes up the same lines but offers essays and prose poems more sharply focused on the making of poems. Three essays consider the qualities that make powerful writing in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost.

Over her career, Oliver continued to include essays within some of her volumes of poetry. Long Life: Essays and Other Writings (2004) is a collection of essays and other writings in which Oliver intersperses personal reflections in poetry and essay forms. Oliver has also published two works that instruct readers concerning the writing and reading of poetry: A Poetry Handbook (1994) and Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998). Oliver also provided text to accompany the photographs of the late Molly Malone Cook in Our World (2007). Published in 2016, Upstream collects a selection of several previously published essays that Oliver had written over her career and includes a piece about Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she had lived for many years.

Achievements

Mary Oliver was known for her graceful, passionate voice, and her ability to discover deep, sustaining spiritual qualities in moments of encounter with nature. Her vision was ecstatic, arising from silence, darkness, deep pain, and questioning—a searching sensibility acutely aware and on the lookout everywhere for transformative moments. Her central subject was the difficult journey of life and the capacity of the human imagination to discover energy, passion, compassion, and the light of conscious being in the very places where the difficult is encountered.

Acts of deep attention enable a crossing over into nature’s consciousness for a time to revitalize bodily awareness. The poet imaginatively disappears into nature, merges with it, and reemerges transformed in experiential fire. Walt Whitman was her great forebear, although instead of an ever-present “I” seeking a merging intimacy, Oliver sought instead a dissolving oneness in which the reader displaces her in order to enter more directly the experience she renders. In her work, ordinary diction and syntax coupled with startlingly fresh images fuse in a passion that seems ordinary yet extraordinarily tender and liquid.

Among Oliver’s awards were the Shelley Memorial Award (1970), the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award (1973), two Ohioana Book Awards for Poetry (1973, 1993), an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1983), the Pulitzer Prize (1984) for American Primitive, the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award (both 1991) for House of Light, the National Book Award (1992) for New and Selected Poems, and the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (both 1998). She also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1972) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980–81).

After publishing Swan (2010), A Thousand Mornings (2012), and Dog Songs (2013), Oliver continued to explore questions of metaphysics and nature in Blue Horses, a collection published in 2014. The poems show Oliver discovering the spiritual in the natural world, but the landscape has changed from the New England coast of previous poems to more southern landscapes. Her collection Felicity: Poems (2015), which she published at the age of eighty, continues with her themes of finding solace in nature. In 2017, she published her collection Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. The book includes approximately two hundred of her poems published over fifty years.

Biography

Mary Oliver’s poetry bears witness to a difficult childhood growing up in Ohio, one in which she was particularly at odds with her father, a teacher who died without their being reconciled. Her childhood experience profoundly influenced her poetry, as the body of her work develops a journey of healing from the effects of trauma. In “Rage,” she writes of a childhood incest scene, detailing its damaging and continuing effects on daily adult life. Her poetry is remarkable for its limited focus on herself as a personality while showing a path out of terror and sorrow to acceptance, safety, joy, and freedom.

Oliver attended Ohio State University for one year, then transferred to Vassar College, but left after a year. She taught at several institutions: the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown, Massachusetts; Case Western Reserve as Mather Visiting Professor; Sweet Briar College in Virginia as Banister Writer-in-Residence; and Bennington College in Vermont as Catherine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching (1996–2001).

Having lived with Cook for many years in New England, Oliver moved to Florida sometime after Cook's death in 2005. On January 17, 2019, she died following a battle with lymphoma at her home in Hobe Sound, Florida, at the age of eighty-three.

Analysis

Mary Oliver’s presence in her poems is most often a clear-sighted moving of eye and mind while staying physically still. She disappears, in a sense, by projecting her sense and moral life onto precise and compelling images that draw the reader into the “I” as experiencer. Through the projection of sensibility in the scene of nature, she can be harsh but accepting and express responsibility for her own life. For example, in “Moccasin Flowers” (from House of Light), the plant and human merge in spiritual ecstasy:

But all my life—so far— I have loved best  how the flowers rise   and open, howthe pink lungs of their bodies enter the fire of the world  and stand there shining   and willing—the onething they can do before they shuffle forward  into the floor of darkness, they   become the trees.

In her characteristic step-down lines, which give a feel of graceful floating, Oliver expresses the nature and work of beings to be fully and joyfully in the world before they move on to their merging in death.

Although Oliver began writing in the midst of the confessional movement of Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, she never took on a victim persona. To the contrary, all her effort went toward entering the deepest truths of what is within reach of human consciousness. Thus she embraced the totality, from people’s wild and animal nature—joyful and painful—to their storied and moral questionings. Most often looking to nature for experiential knowledge, she was deeply Romantic in the American vein, taking as her models Henry David Thoreau, Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson . The opening of “The Buddha’s Last Instruction” (from House of Light) succinctly states her aim: “’Make of yourself a light.’” The closing line, “He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd,” speaks of the terrifying difficulty of that journey. Between these lines, Oliver sees existence as a gift of “inexplicable value,” and to see this fact, which is imaged in the sun, is to become oneself a light. The way of healing and spiritual awareness is through entering what nature knows.

Oliver's collection A Thousand Mornings depicts the natural environment of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she lived. Dog Songs collects favorite poems about dogs. Blue Horses returns to the natural world and the theme of change.

No Voyage, and Other Poems

Oliver’s first five volumes of poetry, published over sixteen years, show the poet beginning with a lyrical “I” who is, like Whitman, awake, watching and listening to nature, simultaneously an individual person grounded in a scene of mythic resonance and “at ease in darkness” of creative natural life. In “Being Country Bred,” from her first collection, No Voyage, and Other Poems,

Spring is still miles away, and yet I wakeThroughout the dark, listen, and throb with allHer summoning explosions underground.

The dark underside of nature is the unconscious coming to light, bringing danger and the excitement of possibility. In “No Voyage” (the title poem), she refuses to leave her own identity, determining instead to stay and “make peace with the fact” of her grief.

The poems of No Voyage, and Other Poems and The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems are conventionally versified, and many are narrative-based vignettes of people from Oliver’s childhood. “At Blackwater Pond” (collected in New and Selected Poems), however, is a short nine-line lyric that presages her mature work. In a baptism-communion-resurrection scene, the poet dips her hands in water and drinks.

. . . It tasteslike stone, leaves, fire. It falls coldinto my body, waking the bones. I hear themdeep inside me, whisperingoh what is that beautiful thingthat just happened?

The mystery of ecstatic awakening precisely matches the flow of rapturous experience.

Twelve Moons

The subject and technique develop further in Twelve Moons—for instance, in “Mussels,” with its short, step-down lines resisting, like the shelled animals, her grip. In “Sleeping in the Forest,” the poet finds herself imaginatively transformed as she becomes a dark, fluid consciousness, one with the night’s beings and businesses: “By morning/ I had vanished at least a dozen times/ into something better.” James Wright’s influence is evident (three poems are dedicated to him) in the leaving of the body in ecstatic moments to “break into blossom.” The poem "The Black Walnut Tree" has also proven especially impactful.

American Primitive

With American Primitive, Oliver achieved a fully developed vision of return to the earth for healing and a reciprocal healing of the earth. The acute perceptiveness and radiant clarity presaged in some earlier poems arrive strong and sustained. Using nature and American Indian themes, the poet shows the body becoming firmly the locus of mind and spirit. However, there is a clear separation; Oliver is fully aware that boundaries can be crossed but must be crossed back again. Knowledge is brought back from the visions of nature.

Poems such as “Lightning” and “Vultures” acknowledge the journey into the other world as fearful and painful: Sorrow and death are part of nature, and the only way to heal is to accept this and go the difficult path straight through terror. “Mushrooms” accepts nature’s poisonous aspects but engages respect versus fear as the helpful knowledge. “Egrets” traces the journey into the dark interior. The traveler is “hot and wounded” but comes suddenly to an empty pond out of which three egrets rise as “a shower/ of white fire!” She sees that they walk through each moment patiently, without fear, “unruffled, sure/ by the laws/ of their faith not logic,/ they opened their wings/ softly and stepped/ over every dark thing.” In “The Honey Tree,” she boldly ascends into ecstatic joy of the body as a result of the difficult work of acceptance for her other poems. Ecstasy, she writes, results from so long hungering for freedom to be oneself unrestricted by pain of the pain. “Oh, anyone can see/ how I love myself at last!/ how I love the world!”

However, there is mourning for beings who did not survive. “Ghosts” is an elegy for the plains buffalo. This long poem ends with a dream in which a cow tenderly attends her newborn calf like “any caring woman.” In a characteristic prayerful image, the poet kneels and asks to become part of them. It is a gesture toward death, which so many of Oliver’s poems make, expressing simultaneously sorrow and ecstasy balanced in empathic tenderness. In “University Hospital, Boston,” she mourns a friend who is dying, and one she did not know who is gone suddenly from his bed.

Dream Work

Dream Work is the darkest of Oliver’s work, as she goes back to consider and repair major losses. Continuing in the vein of American Primitive and the Deep Image poets, she uses shamanist and other mythic vehicles to enter the otherness of consciousness to understand and absorb the power she wants to incorporate while shedding what is outworn or harmful. There is a new probing of the personal and the political as she delves into the suffering human beings cause each other.

“Rage,” “The Journey,” and “A Visitor” revisit the effects of abusive childhood experience in order to name harm and reclaim active responsibility. Perhaps the best known of these poems is “Wild Geese,” which honors the experience of “the soft animal of your body” as essential to moving out of blame, guilt, and isolation and back to connection with the world. Other poems, such as “Stanley Kunitz,” honor those she has learned from, such as poet Stanley Kunitz, and express that learning is the result not of magic but of hard, patient digging, weeding, pruning, and “coaxing the new.”

New and Selected Poems

New and Selected Poems contains thirty new poems and generous selections from the twenty-year span of Oliver’s poetry up to 1992. The volume makes Oliver appear to be more of a nature writer than she was, as the majority of poems selected are engagements with nature but are without their full context of the healing journey. The new poems find Oliver on the other side of pain, having resolved grief and moved past terror, so that she is able to cross with ease “that porous line/ where my own body was done with/ and the roots and the stems and the flowers/ began” (“White Flowers”). “Alligator Poem” relates a terrifying encounter with the animal while drinking on her knees. The lesson is in how the water “healed itself with a slow whisper” after the alligator has sunk out of sight, how she “saw the world as if for the second time/ the way it really is.” She gathers a token of wild flowers to hold in her shaking hands—a gesture that is an emblem of her poetic enterprise, nature giving both dark and light, fear and comfort, death and life. She chooses to gather and hold life and beauty.

The Leaf and the Cloud

A long epigraph from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–60) explains the leaf as a veil between the darkness of natural being and humankind, and the cloud as a veil between God and humankind. The Leaf and the Cloud is a single long poem, a seven-lyric sequence that progressively swells higher into ecstatic union with the world. Oliver writes the journey of a person who is sixty, who looks back on her painful childhood, buries her parents, but will not “give them the kiss of complicity” or “the responsibility for my life.” She declares “glory is my work” and imaginatively becomes all creatures and parts of the earth, hunter as well as hunted. The poet is part of the world, its radiant witness, not separate: Words “sweet and electric, words flow from the brain/ and out the gate of the mouth.”

Whitman is evident everywhere in voice, style, subject, and theme. The “I” ranges from the personal to the universal, gives bits of personal history to set the record down and then moves beyond them, lists objects of nature as divine life, declares prophetically, asks rhetorical questions, and embraces death as part of life.

Why I Wake Early

Oliver demonstrates increasing attention to religious devotion, questions of faith and mystery, while maintaining her signature style of close observations of nature. In this regard, her later poetry follows the tradition of William Wordsworth and Emerson—the known informing about the unknown. How these two factors work together in Oliver’s imagination affects much of her later work. Many poems in Why I Wake Early present a happy affirmation of human experience within this world. One is defined by looking into the mirror of nature. With ultimate reality in mind, the increasing spiritual contemplation contrasts with unnecessary, trivial trinkets of materialism. Oliver’s ecopoetic attitude challenges assumptions of consumerism: “Impossible to believe we need so much/ as the world wants us to buy,” and again she contrasts all “this buying and selling” with the “beautiful earth in [her] heart,” a heart that “grow[s] sharp” and “cold” given the context of seeing “what has been done to [the earth]” (“What Was Once the Largest Shopping Center in Northern Ohio Was Built Where There Had Been a Pond I Used to Visit Every Summer Afternoon”).

Oliver’s collection asks readers to hear the mysterious word that precedes human activity. “Accept the miracle,” she writes (in “Logos”), “and don’t worry about what is reality,/ or what is plain, or what is mysterious.” Here logos joined with imagination constitutes the miraculous: “If you can imagine it, it is all those things.” In a manner similar to Emily Dickinson’s style when writing about God, Oliver draws insight from small, apparently insignificant creatures, such as a cricket “moving the grains of the hillside” in “Song of the Builders.” This activity is compared to the speaker “. . . think[ing] about God—/ a worthy pastime.” Both cricket and human are “inexplicable” as they are busy “building the universe.”

Thirst

Thirst continues the spiritual introspection seen in the previous volume. Both collections are dedicated to Oliver’s late beloved partner, Cook. Thirst offers a grieving persona trying to balance happy memories with an unknown future. Intense grief and loss are accentuated, although the larger context of nature as a reliable, friendly guide toward consolation and insight remains constant. The tone is set by the epigram quoting The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: “you can become all flame.” This hinting toward transformation, signaling a longing for reunion and participation in the force beyond life’s mysteries, marks this volume. Loss leaves Oliver thirsty for the ultimate and causes her to seek the mystical all around her. The prose poem “Thirst,” presented as an epilogue to the volume, explains the genesis of the preceding poems: “Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.”

Sadness and serious contemplation, marked by poems inspired by the Psalms and other biblical books, are balanced by lighter interactions with the affectionate, willful dog Percy, whose presence seems to help the poet negotiate her way through grief. Percy, as chief signifier of the natural, nonhuman world around the poet, functions something like a spiritual guide whose curiosity and independent joy help Oliver reacquaint herself with the steady consolation to be found in nature and to remind readers that life is precious in all its forms. Here Oliver realizes that darkness also “was a gift” (“The Uses of Sorrow”) and that “weeds in a vacant lot” as well as “the blue iris” (“Praying”) may serve to deliver one to silence, to prayerful thanksgiving and transformation.

Red Bird

Oliver’s next collection, Red Bird, displays renewed vitality. The poems suggest a healthy balance of enjoying life’s often overlooked gifts while being acutely aware of death and danger within nature. Here, though, grief is not emphasized along with death. The poet says it is time for the heart “. . . to come back/ from the dark” (“Summer Morning”). The dangerous is beautiful, like a panther with “a conscience/ that never blinks” (“With the Blackest of Inks”). Oliver’s poetry celebrates a fullness of earth by one whose heart is full and whose mind is aware not only of goodness but also of the injustice of power and dangers of materialism. Her voice proclaims the triumph of knowledge and refuses to give in to fear.

The controlling metaphor, Red Bird, serves as a messenger whose announcements frame the collection. In the first poem, “Red Bird,” Red Bird comes in winter, as a reminder that it is possible to endure cold death. At the same time, he suggests that other joyful seasons will follow. In the last poem, “Red Bird Explains Himself,” Red Bird, like a Platonic philosopher, teaches that bodies need “a song, a spirit, a soul” and that the “soul has need of a body.”

This volume sings with energy. Oliver communes with the “heaven of earth” (“Luke”). She is concerned less with processing grief or theological consummation (as in the previous two books) than with a frank recognition that the natural order exhibits a kindness if it is sought and understood. This includes foxes killing mice: “. . . the fear that makes/ all of us, sometime or other,/ flee for the sake/ of our small and precious lives” (“Make of All Things, Even Healings”). Within this context, Oliver asserts, “someday we’ll live in the sky,” but for now “the house of our lives is this green world” (“Boundaries”). Like an ancient sage, Oliver understands that this green world is subject to change and death: “. . . lilies/ in their bright dresses// cannot last/ but wrinkle fast/ and fall” (“Another Everyday Poem”). Given this, she emphasizes the “small, available things” of the world, like the hummingbird, whose free existence negates human striving for “pieces of gold—/ or power” (“Summer Story”). Oliver wonderfully contrasts the healthy natural order with “the terrible debris of progress” (“Meadowlark Sings and I Greet Him in Return”).

Evidence

Oliver’s Evidence collects her themes. The poems present evidence of good and bad, beauty and harm, God and humanity, earth and sky in an artistic, realistically balanced combination. Human choice corresponds to the potential of each category. “Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue,” as the title poem, “Evidence,” asserts. Another line, “There are many ways to perish, or to flourish,” displays the parameters of choice and consequence. Within this same poem, the capacity for human consequence is contrasted with symbols from nature, such as swans, among whom “. . . there is none called the least, or/ the greatest” and “. . . pine trees that never forget their/ recipe for renewal.”

Oliver’s poetry offers a frank realization of approaching death, but there is a profound determination to live naturally, simply (like Thoreau and others), and happily within the mysterious bonds of nature. Some choices lead to despair and destruction, and others lead to positive outcomes, but true peace and deep joy seem to be found by understanding that not all knowledge or power is available to humans. The ability (and necessity) to humbly accept limitation, as eternally signified by nature, is Oliver’s legacy.

Bibliography

Bryson, J. Scott. The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry. U of Iowa P, 2005. One of the examples of growing interest in ecocriticism and scholarship. A good portion concerns Oliver and environmental concerns evident in her poetry.

Burton-Christie, Douglas. “Nature, Spirit, and Imagination in the Poetry of Mary Oliver.” Cross Currents, vol. 46, no. 1, 1996, pp. 77–87. Examines Oliver’s poetry as the work of spiritual attention and acceptance versus the will to change and domesticate.

Constantakis, Sara, editor. Poetry for Students. Vol. 31. Thomson/Gale Group, 2010. Contains an analysis of Oliver’s poem “The Black Snake.”

Fast, Robin Riley. “Moore, Bishop, and Oliver: Thinking Back, Re-Seeing the Sea.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 39, no. 3, 1993, pp. 364–79. Considers Oliver in the line of Marianne Moore’s and Elizabeth Bishop’s concern with death and the unconscious as background context for poetic imagination.

Fox, Margalit. "Mary Oliver, 83, Prize-Winning Poet of the Natural World, Is Dead." The New York Times, 17 Jan. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/obituaries/mary-oliver-dead.html. Accessed 4 Feb. 2019.

Graham, Vicki. “’Into the Body of Another’: Mary Oliver and the Poetics of Becoming Other.” Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 30, no. 4, 1994, pp. 352–72. An extensive treatment of Oliver as a postmodern feminist poet for whom, contrary to male Romantic poets, merging with consciousness regarded as other is a fuller apprehension of multiplicity instead of a loss of subjectivity.

Gregory, Alice. "Mary Oliver and the Nature-esque." Poetry Foundation, 16 Feb. 2011, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69656/mary-oliver-and-the-nature-esque. Accessed 21 Nov. 2017.

Heitman, Danny. "Upstream Places Poet Mary Oliver in her 'Arena of Delight.'" Christian Science Monitor, 19 Oct. 2016, www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2016/1019/Upstream-places-poet-Mary-Oliver-in-her-arena-of-delight. Accessed 21 Nov. 2017.

McNew, Janet. “Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 30, no. 1, 1990, pp. 59–77. A fascinating treatment of Oliver as a feminist Romantic poet writing against the tradition of male Romantics, who imagined nature as feminine, to be both desired and feared. Critiques mainline Romantic criticism as gender-biased.

Mann, Thomas W. The God of Dirt: Mary Oliver and the Other Book of God. Cowley, 2004. Connects and comments on the religious language and imagery in Oliver’s poetry.