Beyond these bare biographical facts, it is not easy to get a deeper purchase. She
gave only a handful of interviews over the course of her life, and while her essays
provide some insight, the biographical detail they offer is scant. She always
wanted her writing to speak for her, not about her. And in truth, hers was a quiet
life, her adult life at least marked by few of the great upheavals that make for
dramatic retelling. In an essay about weather, she said it herself: she did not care
for storms, for tempests, for “the exertions that make history”: “The problem
is, one wants, both in life and in writing, a story. And the ferocious weathers
are the perfect foundation; in all tempests we must do something. We must get
somewhere—and so the story begins.”
She herself preferred a quieter existence, one in which solitary contemplation
took centre stage. She rose early almost every day before dawn to walk in the
woods near her home with her pencil and notebook, attentive to the natural
world around her and trying to achieve that state of empathic communion
with her surroundings conducive to poetic inspiration. Her friends would say
that if you saw Oliver out in the fields slowing down and eventually coming to
a complete standstill, you knew she’d had a good walk; this was how she wrote,
more often than not: standing upright with pencil and notebook in the fields or
the woods. She even secreted pencils among the trees in case inspiration struck
when she didn’t have one handy. As she once said wryly in an interview when
asked what she’d done with her life, “I used up a lot of pencils.”
It is probably no coincidence that Oliver chose to spend the majority of her life
in New England, the home of the 19th Century transcendentalist movement, of
which Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau were
leading figures. Not only did those writers serve as her early creative role models,
but in many ways her poetry was a contemporary continuation of that tradition.
Her poetry shares much of the transcendentalist sensibility: its belief in the
healing power of nature, its longing for mystical experience and dissolution
of personal boundaries. Nature is not only a repository of beauty and a source
of physical and spiritual nourishment, it is a domain of spirit that constantly
speaks to the person attentive enough to hear: “I go down to the shore in the
morning/and depending on the hour the waves/are rolling in or moving out,/and
I say, oh, I am miserable,/what shall—/what should I do? And the sea says/in its
lovely voice:/Excuse me, I have work to do.” The sea’s relentless and indifferent
activity becomes a reminder of the transience and ultimate insignificance of
personal suffering.
Animals in particular served as poetic muses for her, and indeed as spiritual
messengers. Perhaps her most famous poem, Wild Geese finds in the call of those
birds the healing voice of a world that transcends personal pain and dissolves
human isolation: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/the world offers itself
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