A Poetry Handbook

Mary Oliver was an American poet whose plainspoken nature lyrics made her one of the most widely read poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio, she briefly attended Ohio State University and Vassar College without completing a degree, and credited her formative artistic education to a sustained, self-directed apprenticeship reading the work of poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Oliver's career-defining recognition came with American Primitive, her 1983 collection that won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her 1992 New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award. Across more than twenty books of poetry and several volumes of prose, she returned repeatedly to a small set of subjects — the woods, ponds, and tidal flats around Provincetown, Massachusetts where she lived for much of her adult life; the daily walks she took at dawn with a notebook; the close observation of animals, weather, and seasonal change. Her best-known poems, including "Wild Geese," "The Summer Day," and "When Death Comes," reach audiences far outside the usual readership of contemporary poetry, regularly appearing in wedding programs, eulogies, and meditation curricula. The closing line of "The Summer Day" — "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" — became one of the most quoted lines of contemporary American verse. Later collections including Thirst, Felicity, and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver continued her examination of grief, faith, attention, and the natural world. She died in 2019, leaving a body of work that has remained continuously in print and that introduced a wide general audience to the close-observation tradition in American nature poetry.