HISTORICAL PROFILEMary Oliver
WORDS: PIERZ NEWTON-JOHN
IMAGE: EILEEN AGAROn January 17 of this year, the great American poet Mary Oliver died at the
age of 83. By the time of her death she was that rarest of things in the world
of poets: a commercial success— though she herself never cared much about
money. She had always considered too many possessions a distraction from
the creative life. “I have a notion,” she once said, “that if you are going to be
spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material
things.” One might consider her success an anomaly in an age that has relegated
poetry to the fringes of culture, especially since her subject was a natural world
that few of us are in touch with any more, her style devotional and ecstatic
in an increasingly rational, technological society. She might easily have been
dismissed as an out-of-touch relic. Yet perhaps it is those very characteristics
that explain her popularity: she spoke to a longing that many people feel for
a sense of connection and belonging—lost to many of us and yet shines with
luminous clarity from her poetry.
Oliver’s life was, in an outward sense, not an especially eventful one. She was
born on September 10, 1935 and grew up in a middle-class home in a semi-
rural suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. At the age of 17, she travelled to Austerlitz,
New York to visit the home of the recently deceased Edna St. Vincent Millay, a
Pulitzer-winning poet whose work she greatly admired. There she befriended
the poet’s sister Norma and ended up working as her secretary for several years,
helping to organise the poet’s papers. It was on a return visit to Austerlitz in
the late 1950s that she met Molly Malone Cook, who would become her life
partner and literary agent until Cook’s death in 2005. The two made a home
in Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, where Oliver lived until the last
few years of her life, when she moved to Florida to be close to friends. In 1984
she won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection American Primitive and in 1992 was
awarded the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems. She also received
honorary doctorates from several universities.
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