Mary Oliver

Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) was an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and the National Book Award in 1992. She found inspiration for her work in nature and had a lifelong habit of solitary walks in the wild. Her poetry is characterized by wonderment at the natural environment, vivid imagery, spirituality, and unadorned language. Oliver is one of the best-selling poets in American history.

Early life Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. In a 2011 interview with Maria Shriver, Oliver said she had been sexually abused as a child and had experienced recurring nightmares. Oliver called her family dysfunctional, adding that though her childhood was very hard, writing helped her create her own world.

Oliver began writing poetry at the age of 14. She graduated from the local high school in Maple Heights. In the summer of 1951, at age 15, she attended the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, now known as Interlochen Arts Camp, where she was in the percussion section of the National High School Orchestra. At 17, she visited the home of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Austerlitz, New York, where she formed a friendship with the late poet's sister Norma. Oliver spent the next six to seven years at the estate helping Norma organize Edna St. Vincent Millay's papers.

Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s but did not receive a degree at either college. Her first collection of poems, No Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when she was 28. During the early 1980s, Oliver taught at Case Western Reserve University. Her fifth collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984.

In 2007, The New York Times called Oliver "far and away, this country's best-selling poet."

Poetic identity Oliver's poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England. Provincetown is the principal setting for her work after she moved there in the 1960s. Nature stirred her creativity, and Oliver, an avid walker, often pursued inspiration on foot. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home: Oliver said her favorite poets were Walt Whitman, Rumi, Hafez, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.

Oliver was also compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release. Though criticized for writing poetry that assumes a close relationship between women and nature, she found that the self is only strengthened through immersion in the natural environment. Oliver is also known for her straightforward language and accessible themes. The Harvard Review describes her work as an antidote to "inattention and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making."

In a review of Oliver's 2006 collection Thirst, Fordham University professor Angela Alaimo O'Donnell wrote: "Often the poet approaches God, uncharacteristically, through more conventionally religious means: through the language of prayer and meditation, through engagement of liturgical ritual and through participation in sacrament. The presence of these elements marks a movement away from the nonspecific spirituality implicit in Oliver's previous work and toward a frank acknowledgment of faith that is decidedly Christian. The gifts the poet discovers as she endures this dark night of the soul are many, and chief among these is her faith. In a remarkable series of poems interspersed throughout the volume, she chronicles a process of awakening to God's loving presence through the reading of Scripture ("After Her Death"), through attending church and partaking of the Eucharist ("Coming to God: First Days", "The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church: The Eucharist") and through imaginative engagement of Christ's words and events in his life ("Six Recognitions of the Lord", "The Poet Thinks About the Donkey and Gethsemane"). In these latter two poems, Oliver explores spiritual and aesthetic terrain that is traditional and yet does so in a way that is characteristically her own."

Debra Dean Murphy wrote, "Although Oliver may have begun to treat theological themes more frequently and to use Christian language more explicitly, she remains true to what her work has always been about: pointing readers to the gift of presence—reminding us, in poems that are often deceptively simple, of what it means to attend to what is before us in any given moment. This is also the gift of wonder, of a posture of receptivity that Christians sometimes speak of as ... the calling to live more fully into our humanity as persons bearing the imago dei, to mirror the divine dance of mutual presence, mutual receptivity, mutual love.

Personal life On a visit to the town of Austerlitz, New York in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who became her partner for over 40 years. Of Provincetown, she said: "I too fell in love with the town, that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers.[...] M. and I decided to stay."

Some of her personal life is covered in the 2026 documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, directed by Sasha Waters, which has a 97% positive rating by 30 critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

Death In 2012, Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, but was treated and given a "clean bill of health." Oliver died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019, at the age of 83.

Critical reception Oliver is one of the most widely read American poets in history and has been called "America's most beloved poet". But her popularity exceeds her critical reputation. From her earliest publications, critics called her work trite, sentimental, didactic, and self-indulgent, labels that endured throughout her career; William Logan called her "the poet laureate of the self-help biz". Benjamin Myers called Oliver's frequent invocations of wonder and faith "blithely bland" and "pandering". Responding to characterizations of sentimentality, Oliver's proponents have sought to emphasize her portrayal of violence and darkness in nature, and subtexts that "might have been lost in the process of memeification". and her coverage in journalistic criticism was scarce relative to her stature: The New York Times never published a full-length review of her work.

In the Women's Review of Books, Maxine Kumin called Oliver an "indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects."

Vicki Graham suggests Oliver oversimplifies the affiliation of gender and nature: "Oliver's celebration of dissolution into the natural world troubles some critics: her poems flirt dangerously with romantic assumptions about the close association of women with nature that many theorists claim put the woman writer at risk." In The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Sue Russell wrote, "Oliver will never be a balladeer of contemporary lesbian life in the vein of Marilyn Hacker, or an important political thinker like Adrienne Rich; but the fact that she chooses not to write from a similar political or narrative stance makes her all the more valuable to our collective culture."

Selected awards and honors

1969/70 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. 1991 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light 1992 National Book Award for Poetry for New and Selected Poems 1998 Lannan Literary Award for poetry 2007 Honorary Doctorate Dartmouth College 2012 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Poetry for A Thousand Mornings

Works

Poetry collections 1963 No Voyage, and Other Poems Dent (New York, NY), expanded edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1965. 1972 The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems Harcourt (New York, NY) 1978 The Night Traveler Bits Press 1978 Sleeping in the Forest Ohio University (a 12-page chapbook, p. 49–60 in The Ohio Review—Vol. 19, No. 1 [Winter 1978]) 1979 Twelve Moons Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1983 American Primitive Little, Brown (Boston, MA) 1986 Dream Work Atlantic Monthly Press (Boston, MA) 1987 Provincetown Appletree Alley, limited edition with woodcuts by Barnard Taylor 1990 House of Light Beacon Press (Boston, MA) 1992 New and Selected Poems [volume one] Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1994 White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems Harcourt (San Diego, CA) 1995 Blue Pastures Harcourt (New York, NY) 1997 West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) 1999 Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) 2000 The Leaf and the Cloud Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts), (prose poem) 2002 What Do We Know Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts) 2003 Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays Beacon (Boston, MA) 2004 Why I Wake Early: New Poems Beacon (Boston, MA) 2004 Blue Iris: Poems and Essays Beacon (Boston, MA) 2004 Wild geese: selected poems, Bloodaxe, 2005 New and Selected Poems, volume two Beacon (Boston, MA) 2005 At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver (audio cd) 2006 Thirst: Poems (Boston, MA) 2007 Our World with photographs by Molly Malone Cook, Beacon (Boston, MA) 2008 The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays , Beacon Press, 2008 Red Bird Beacon (Boston, MA) 2009 Evidence Beacon (Boston, MA) 2010 Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Boston, MA) 2012 A Thousand Mornings Penguin (New York, NY) 2013 Dog Songs Penguin Press (New York, NY) 2014 Blue Horses Penguin Press (New York, NY) 2015 Felicity Penguin Press (New York, NY) 2017 Devotions The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver Penguin Press (New York, NY)

Non-fiction books and other collections 1994 A Poetry Handbook Harcourt (San Diego, CA) 1998 Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA) 2004 Long Life: Essays and Other Writings Da Capo (Cambridge, Massachusetts) 2016 Upstream: Selected Essays Penguin (New York, NY)

Works in translation

Catalan 2018 Ocell Roig Translated by C. Oproae, Godall Edicions (Barcelona) German 2023 Sag mir, was hast du vor mit deinem wilden, kostbaren Leben: Gesammelte Gedichte Translated by J. Brôcan, Diogenes Verlag AG (Zurich)