On Mary Oliver's Poetry
Janet McNew (1989)
[McNew’s closely reasoned essay places Oliver’s poetry within the framework of the traditional romantic nature poetry paradigm, revealing striking differences in the relationship of the speaker to her subjects. Numerous examples from a number of poems over several volumes support her contrasts.]
… Why, we might ask, is so much important contemporary criticism in the romantic tradition unable to appreciate the kind of nature poetry that Mary Oliver writes?
The areas of dispute for these distinguished critics of romantic poetry usually involve boundaries – first, of course, between the self and nature, but also by extension between soul and body, consciousness and unconsciousness, subject and object, culture and nature, language and muteness, immortality and death, imaginative poet and immature child, transcendence and immanence. Hence, when we examine the archetypic situation of modern nature poetry … we also recognize the interplay of these mythologically opposed pairs. Furthermore, all of these dichotomies have also been philosophically and mythically related to that most pervasive pair, masculine and feminine. The usual sexual dynamic in romantic nature poetry assumes, therefore, a speaking male subject who explores his relation to a mute and female nature. Finding an authentic place in this traditional pattern presents challenges for women poets …
[….]
What Oliver does in her most intense visionary poetry is not so much to defy patriarchal boundaries as to ignore their defining powers. The terms "soul" and "body," for example, do appear in her poetry, but her mischievous phrasing often confuses the expected dichotomy. [Two poems, "Pink Moon – The Pond" and "Humpbacks" provide examples, from which it is concluded that: "In Oliver’s ‘primitive’ world, physicality thus becomes the most visionary spirituality."]
[….]
Intensely, sensuous bodily experience repr4sents for Oliver the human in the act of recovering a truth – that we are creatures. Memory of lost childhood sensuality, "splendor in the grass," led Wordsworth to a very different truth. In his "Ode: On Intimations of Immortality," he demoted nature from mother to "homely nurse" because he wanted to claim a more diverse parentage, a patriarchal one with "God, who is our home." Few romantic poets, even those like Wordsworth who wrote to recover a closer relation to nature, finally see themselves as entirely natural creatures, for natural creatures die, and poets, as Wordsworth’s title indicates, must find an imaginative route to immortality. Oliver remains faithful to her attachment to nature. Instead of forsaking the natural for supernatural eternity, her poems follow the cycles of the seasons to image loss and the possibility for renewal. These vast natural cycles, which usually symbolize traps and prison houses for the romantic visionary, are strangely consoling for Oliver. Wedding her close to them holds her close to the deepest mysteries she knows, those of natural transformation. …
Oliver’s visionary goal, then, involves constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully confers subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition. …
At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal "a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy ‘ like a shadow" (from Dream Work, p. 64), a dream of oneness with a maternal earth-womb.
From Janet McNew, "Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry," Contemporary Literature 30:1 (Spring 1989), 60, 68, 69, 70, 72, 75.
Vicki Graham (1993)
[Graham examines Oliver’s third collection, American Primitive, for poems in which Oliver imaginatively enters the perspective of an Other, often an animal. At the close of her essay, she offers comparisons with native American beliefs, and her concluding remarks may be aligned with those in the essay following hers by Robin Riley Fast.]
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. [Graham here inserts a footnote: "For a detailed discussion of the complex relationship between nature and language for women writers see Margaret Homans’s Bearing the Word."] But for Oliver, immersion in nature is not death: language is not destroyed and the writer is not silenced. To merge with the non-human is to acknowledge the self’s mutability and multiplicity, not to lose subjectivity. But few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver’s work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain skeptical "that identification with natur4 can empower women" [a quote from Diane S. Bond’s "The Language of Nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver," Womens Studies 21:1 (1992), p. 1.]
[…..]
American Primitive ends with fulfillment; the blank space at the end of "The Gardens" implies that Oliver has lost herself in the "body of another." But this loss of self is never permanent. Oliver becomes, in turn, a bear, a whale, a fish, but, as each poem and each subsequent transformation suggests, she returns again to human consciousness and must repeat the process of becoming another over and over. Rooted in the binary oppositions that structure Western thinking, Oliver can never fully escape the teaching of her culture that the mind is divided from the body and identity depends on keeping intact the boundaries between the self an others. Each of the selves Oliver becomes in this collection is self-contained and separate. A bear, like a human, has its own boundaries and becoming bear as Oliver understands this process involves moving back and forth across the boundaries between herself and the bear rather than dissolving the boundaries themselves.
Oliver’s desire to become other through mimesis conflicts with a culturally instilled need to establish a single, unified self, but Oliver neither faces this problem head on nor articulates it clearly as another poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, does. Rilke, too, longs to get inside the body of another creature, to "let [himself] precisely into the dog’s center, the point from which it begins to be a dog, the place in it where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished." But unlike Oliver, Rilke articulates the consequence of staying there: "For awhile you can endure being inside the dog; you just have to be alert and jump out in time, before its environment has completely enclosed you, since otherwise you would simply remain the dog in the dog and be lost for everything else." It is that "everything else" that Oliver does not want to be lost for. She cannot resign herself to being just "the dog in the dog" because this would mean she would never be a bear or a fish. Giving up human subjectivity would mean, at least as Oliver perceives it, giving up the ability to mime herself into the body of another. It would also mean giving up self-consciousness, knowing who and what she is, as well as the ability to remember and write about the experience. Oliver’s poems suggest that we need language and self-consciousness in order to experience stepping outside of language and the self.
From Vicki Graham, " ‘Into the Body of Another’: Mary Oliver and the Poetics of Becoming Other," Papers on Language and Literature 30:4 (Fall 1994), 352-353, 366-368
Robin Riley Fast (1994)
Mary Oliver’s poetry offers European-American readers a way of responding to Native Americans and the past we share with them that both acknowledges the history and the consequences of colonization and uses that knowledge to start moving beyond the limits of cultural bias and individual disaffection. …
A strong sense of place, and of identity in relation to it, is central to her poetry. Her poems are firmly located in the places where she has lived or travelled, particularly her native Ohio and New England; her moments of transcendence arise organically from the realities of swamp, pond, woods and shore. The vital importance of native or adopted places, however, renders acute her discomfort about hoe her forebears came to be established in Ohio, and about how white Europeans in general established themselves on this continent – by evicting the Indians for whom, too, a sense of self was (and is) fundamentally bound to place. Oliver’s confrontation with her historically rooted discomfort, and her imaginative rapprochement with Indian ways of being in nature, constitute the political grounding of the poems I will discuss here, and contribute to the intensity of many others where politics is not directly evident but where she seeks a holistic relationship to the world. Her treatment of Indians differs significantly from those of such major white male contemporaries and twentieth-century predecessors as Jerome Rothenberg, William Carlos Williams, and Gary Snyder; her poetry, like theirs, raises questions about the meanings of whites’ literary response to Native experience and culture.
[….]
… Oliver’s poems raise questions that strangely echo those she asked so angrily in "Tecumseh": "Where are the Shawnee now? / Do you know?" Why are her living Indians old? Did she stop on the Wind River Reservation or see any Indian people? Do her poems in some sense buy into the myth of the Noble Savage after all? Or is her treatment of Native Americans appropriately tentative and non-presumptuous? As Oliver’s poems generally do not concern human relationships other than the most intimate ones, it is fairly easy, and I think justifiable, to answer "yes" to the last question, let this writer of wonderfully moving and illuminating poetry off the hook, and avoid falling into the ranks of those who demand the right kind of politics of the writer. Nonetheless, such questions remain important, if perhaps unanswerable, for readers inclined to scrutinize the grounds of their own responses to literature and to the worlds that it opens to us. And they are the kinds of questions that we all need to ask, as we come to terms with the plural realities of American literature and culture.
from Robin Riley Fast, "The Native American Presence in Mary Oliver’s Poetry," Kentucky Review 12:1/2 (autumn 1993), 59; 65-66.
Sue Russell (1997)
Until 1993, the sexual preference of poet Mary Oliver was a trade secret, albeit not a very well-kept one. If appearance in gay and lesbian anthologies is the main way readers find out such things, Oliver wasn’t giving any clues. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive in 1982 broadened her readership but did not bring this respected poet out of the closet. The timing must have been right when Oliver was announced as the winner of the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems in 1992. Perjaps spurred by "out and proud" winner Paul Monette (nonfiction, Borrowed Time) and Dorothy Allison (fiction, Bastard Out of Carolina), according to an unnamed Lambda Book Report staffer, Oliver took the stage at the award ceremony and thanked both the Democrats and "the light of my life, Molly Malone Cook," the woman to whom she dedicates her books.
Readers searching eagerly on the basis of this new information for lesbian content in Oliver’s work may come away disappointed. And yet, her personal aesthetic clearly aligns her with a lesbian literary tradition. Rhythmically, her poems adjust themselves to the pace of the poet-observer as she makes her way through forests, across meadows, and along the shore in her native habitat on the Atlantic coast. Her deeply held belief in the eternal ebb and flow of the universe may in fact contribute to Oliver’s stubborn refusal to align herself with any one sociopolitical position.
[….]
Mary 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. Poets who choose indirection as a strategy do so, at least in part, because that is what poetry means to them as a form of expression that can transcend its historical context. We owe them the favor of giving their work our fullest attention, no matter what shelf we find it on.
From Sue Russell, "Mary Oliver: The Poet and the Persona," The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review 4:4 (Fall 1997), 21, 22.
Annette Allen
The power of Oliver's highly acclaimed poetry rests in its passionate attention to the natural world which she sees as the source of revelation about ultimate things. Like her romantic predecessors, Oliver locates wisdom in the wilderness she seeks in solitude, where discoveries about the self and nature's otherness can be made. Her poems of thirty years and her recent prose collection, Blue Pastures (1995), reveal an art driven by visionary conviction in a manner similar to her claimed influences, William Blake and Walt Whitman. Expressed in simple language and familiar imagery, evoking dark and joyous states, this vision of nature is often conveyed in an ecstatic voice that compels. Celebratory and spiritual in her poetic vision, Oliver is one of America 's finest nature poets. . . .
Her first collection, No Voyage and Other Poems (1963), is rooted in a mythical sense of the land and exhibits simplicity and a fine mastery of form, though some critics found the poems mannered. Like Robert Frost, her plain language and conventional forms could mask attention to an uncommon vision of nature's forces. The poems in The River Styx, Ohio and Other Poems (1972) call up an Ohio heritage and reclaim it through memory and myth, while her chapbooks, Night Traveler (1978) and Sleeping in the Forest (1978), develop the mythic dimension more fully, using themes of dreams, birth, and death. Oliver charts a course in the twenty-six poems of Night Traveler between two worlds, human and natural, where the individual faces loneliness and yearns to transcend the limited human world. In "Winter Sleep," the speaker voices her affinity with the she-bear who is the night traveler of the book's title and whose image, closely identified with the poet, reappears in later work. This desire to merge with nature's kingdom opens Oliver's fourth collection, Twelve Moons (1979), in its first poem, "Sleeping in the Forest," a poem where the poet vanishes over and over into the earth. Crafted thematically, Twelve Moons presents a wholistic vision of natural cycles, balancing these processes, as she does eloquently in the twelve moon poems, with what exists in human experience.
Heralded for its perceptions of the visible world and the lyric intensity of Oliver's voice, American Primitive (1983), like no other collection before it, celebrates union with the natural world, immersion in wood and swamp, and becoming other: bear, owl, or whale. For Oliver, the desire to become another begins with longing that originates in the body, but the mind presents an opposing impulse and attempts to bring the body to self-consciousness. "Blossom" and "The Plum Tree" capture this battle between body and mind in a series of oppositions, and while the poems have an edge of didacticism, the sensuous images triumph. In "Crossing the Swamp" and "August," the speakers in the poems merge easily with the other; in the former, she becomes the swamp, her body sprouting branches from the swamp's life force; in "August," she is the bear, more animal than human. Through Oliver's repeating verbs of desire, American Primitive, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, sings its belief that fusion with nature or merging with the non-human releases the self's multiplicity, fluidity, and ultimate joy.
Widening her vision in Dream Work (1986), Oliver expands her subject matter in an increasingly fluid voice, touching on music and the intimate lives of others in "Consequences," "Robert Schumann," and, in the tribute to her mentor, "Stanley Kunitz." This expansion continues in House of Light (1990) with "Singapore" and "lch Bin Der Welt Abhanden Gekommen," a poem about Mahler on his birthday. As before, the ever-present theme, expressed primarily in poems of four or five line stanzas, is still the sensuous world. Spiritual and prophetic, the poems raise philosophical questions, and in revelatory moments, such as the conclusion of "Wild Geese," they signal the importance of the imagination.
In Oliver's oeuvre, New and Selected Poems (1992), which is structured in reverse chronological order, a prevailing idiom of wonder and awe reigns. Most of the poems bear the unique stamp of an Oliver poem: the solitary speaker bringing her uneasy, questioning spirit to the woods or fields in search of understanding, instruction, even solace. The stylistic hallmarks of conversational tone, plain diction, and momentous endings, which frequent Oliver's past collections, appear in the new poems as well. These poems have their strength, however, in the theme of imagined death, which is the final wedding of human and natural for the poet. Death recurs in the thirty new poems in various manifestations: in the bold images of . "When Death Comes," a poem about the poet's own death; in poignant and urgent lines about the lushness of peonies before death; and stoically in the isolating, falling snow of "Lonely, White Fields."
The companion prose works, A Poetry Handbook (1994) and Blue Pastures (1995), collectively offer Oliver's wisdom about the craft of writing, including the analysis of exemplary poems, and reflection on the necessity of solitude and mystery for a writer's life. Chapters on sound, the line, imagery, tone, and form in A Poetry Handbook serve as Oliver's concise, experienced guide to writing poetry. The observational powers that enrich Oliver's poetry surface in the form of soliloquies in Blue Pastures, providing insight to Oliver's childhood, her poetics and philosophy of nature. She meditates on Whitman as the brother she never had, on the merciless homed owl in its flight, and on language as a door past the self. Her brilliant, empathetic essay on the complex love affair between Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Dillon provokes the larger human question; how can we know another's life? This collection, transcendent like her best poems, confirms Oliver's talent for prose writing, which she began in White Pine (1994), a collection of poems and prose poems looser in structure and, according to several critics, somewhat given to commonplace adjectives and adverbs.
The evocative forty pieces of White Pine continue the intense appeal to nature's otherness in poems such as "Toad," where the creature's unknowing grace contrasts with the knowing, conscious language spoken above him. In all of Oliver's poetry, the otherness of the natural world and her longing to merge with it coexist with doubt about the value of human consciousness from which the language she uses, springs. Oliver struggles with her doubts and desires in the theater of the poem, creating a world of flora and beasts transformed in their greenery and creatureliness by language. . . .
from Encylopedia of American Literature. Steven R. Serafin, General Editor. Copyright © 1999 by the Continuum Publishing Company.
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