Mary Oliver

Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet born on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. She grew up in a place where the natural world was close at hand, and as a child she spent much of her time outside, walking or reading. Her father, Edward William Oliver, taught social studies and coached athletics in the Cleveland public schools; her mother was Helen M. Oliver. Oliver later described her Ohio childhood as pastoral in its setting, though she also said her family was dysfunctional and that her childhood was very hard.

Writing became a way for Oliver to make a world of her own. She began writing poetry at 14, graduated from the local high school in Maple Heights, and attended the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, at 15, playing percussion in the National High School Orchestra. At 17, she visited the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz, New York, and became friends with Millay’s sister, Norma. Oliver spent the next six to seven years at the estate helping organize Millay’s papers. She later studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s, though she did not receive a degree from either.

Oliver’s first collection, No Voyage, and Other Poems, appeared in 1963, when she was 28. Her career grew over decades of teaching, writing, and close observation. During the early 1980s she taught at Case Western Reserve University. Her fifth collection, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She was Poet in Residence at Bucknell University in 1986 and Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College in 1991. She later taught at Bennington College until 2001. In 1992, New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award.

Nature was the center of Oliver’s art, not as a distant subject but as a daily presence. After moving to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the 1960s, that town became the principal setting of much of her work. Her poems draw on shore birds, water snakes, moon phases, humpback whales, woods, ponds, and harbor light. She was an avid walker and often wrote from impressions gathered on foot, sometimes carrying a small hand-sewn notebook. She once said that on a successful walk, “I finally just stop and write.” Her poetry was influenced by Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, and she named Whitman, Rumi, Hafez, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats among her favorite poets.

Oliver shared her life for more than 40 years with photographer Molly Malone Cook, whom she met in Austerlitz in the late 1950s. Cook became her partner and literary agent, and they made their home largely in Provincetown until Cook’s death in 2005. Oliver valued her privacy and gave few interviews, yet her work reached a wide public. In 2007, she was called the best-selling poet in the United States. Her poems remain loved for their plain speech, vivid images, solitude, and sense of wonder before the natural world. In “When Death Comes,” she wrote that she wanted to say she had been “a bride married to amazement,” a line that captures the open attention at the heart of her work.