Mary Oliver
In 1992, Mary Oliver received the National Book Award, a recognition that placed her among the most decorated poets writing in English at the time. That honor, arriving years into a career already marked by a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the PEN New England Award, confirmed the sustained regard in which her work was held across American literary culture.
Oliver was born on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, and later attended Maple Heights High School before going on to Ohio State University and Vassar College. She worked as a poet and writer throughout her life, composing in the English language, and also engaged in climate activism. Her career produced a body of work in poetry and prose, with notable titles including The Night Traveler and Red Bird among those associated with her name.
The arc of her public recognition stretched across several decades. The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry established her reputation at a significant level, and the Guggenheim Fellowship provided further institutional acknowledgment of her contributions to American letters. The Shelley Memorial Award and the PEN New England Award added to a record of honors that spanned different corners of the literary world. As a novelist and poet writing in English, she worked within and across forms, bringing to each the careful attention to language that marked her output.
Oliver died on January 17, 2019, in Hobe Sound, Florida, at the age of eighty-three. A citizen of the United States who had spent her life writing and, in time, advocating on matters of climate, she left behind a body of work anchored by those award-winning collections and the sustained critical recognition they earned. The National Book Award she received in 1992 remains one of the concrete measures by which her place in American poetry has been formally acknowledged.
Quotes by Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver's insights on:
It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.
Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.
I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.
At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
