Photographer Unknown, Wild Geese
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
—Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, Dream Works, 1986
Mary Jane Oliver was born in September of 1935 in Maple Heights, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She was an American poet whose work was inspired
by nature, rather than the human world, which arose from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.
As a child, Mary Oliver spent a large amount of her time outside, walking or reading in the pastoral countryside. Writing poetry at the age of fourteen, Oliver was able, at the age of seventeen, to visit the home of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Milley, located in Austerlitz, New York. There she met the late poet’s sister Norma Milley, with whom she formed a friendship. Mary Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the “Steepletop” estate archiving Edna St. Vincent Milley’s papers.
Mary Oliver’s first collection of poems “No Voyage and Other Poems: was published in 1963 when she was twenty-eight. While teaching at Case Western Reserve University, her fifth collection of poetry, “American Primitive”, won
the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984, Mary Oliver became Poet in Residence at Bucknell University in 1986; Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College in 1991; and later she held the Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College, Vermont, until 2001.
Mary Oliver’s 1990 “House of Light” won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award ,and her 1992 “New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award. For its inspiration, her work turns towards nature, and the sense of wonder it instillss. Oliver’s poetry is grounded in her memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England, mostly centered around her life in Provincetown in the 1960s.
Influenced by Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Shelley, Oliver’s work is fulled with imagery of her daily walks, which refuse to acknowledge the boundaries
between nature and the observing self. Known for her unadorned language and common themes, she has been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues.
On a return visit to Austerlitz, in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years. They settled largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived together until Cook’s death in 2005. Oliver continued to live there until she relocated to Florida. She valued her privacy and gave very few interviews.
In 2012, Mary Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, was treated and given a good prognosis. She ultimately died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019 at her home in Florida at the age of eighty-three.