Is Mary Oliver a good poet?

Uh, yeah she is. “The world offers itself to your imagination.”

This comes up every now and then. I remember someone a few years ago saying Mary Oliver was “poetry for people who don’t like poetry.” That’s not true, but even if it is, who cares? Anyway, it came up again when Maggie Zhu tweeted that Mary Oliver is “upmarket Rupi Kaur.” Zhu followed up calling Oliver a “preacher-masquerading-as-poet”. Loyal reader of The Common Reader

Rachael Meager

said this:

I started off yesterday feeling positive towards Mary Oliver. Her work meant a lot to me circa 2019; unhappy hearing her described as middlebrow. Everyone started posting their fave Mary Oliver poem in strident defense of her. I read all of them. Every one of them was middlebrow.

Rachel admires “Wild Geese”, to be clear. (Side note: you should read Rachel’s Substack, it’s great.) I think this is much closer to the truth than what Maggie Zhu said, but I want to add a few thoughts of my own.

1. What is middlebrow? Virginia Woolf said, “The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.” That’s not Mary Oliver.

   1. The OED says it means “intellectually unchallenging or of limited intellectual or cultural value.” Maybe that’s closer: Mary Oliver is reassuring, not challenging. But I don’t think that’s really correct. She is quoted reassuringly, adopted by the hippie/self-care/wellness/spirituality/whatever crowd. But that’s not what her writing really is.

   2. The definition of middlebrow as an adjective gets to the heart of the matter: “demanding or involving only a moderate degree of intellectual application, typically as a result of not deviating from convention.” So, Mary Oliver is derided as more Julie Andrews than Beethoven. OK, maybe, maybe, but I like both Julie Andrews and Beethoven. Everything to its season.

2. Before we dismiss her, shouldn’t we define what she does? Few did this. I see her writing as the Americanisation of a Rumi-esque tradition, the late-twentieth century poetry of the mid-century “spiritual” culture. She’s not New Age. But you can see how she comes out of that post-war secular spiritual-nature culture, with a dose of stoicism. She has something of the self-help about her. Lines like, “I know you never intended to be in this world but you’re in it all the same” sound like they belong in Ted Lasso, but that is because of the uses that culture has subsequently been put to. Was it naff when Seamus Heaney wrote, at the start of his elegy for Robert Lowell, “The way we are living,/ timorous or bold,/ will have been our life”?

3. The problem, for detractors, is that Mary Oliver is not analytic or detached or cynical or knowing. She is not using literature for some bigger, ideological purpose. Instead, heaven forbid, she is earnest. “How rich it is to love the world.” Yes! Yes! How rich indeed! Of course, you often aren’t permitted to talk like that in many modern literary groupings. Eh, their loss. Her work is a standing rebuke to their disinterest. “The world offers itself to your imagination.”

4. She tries to simply be, simply express, her perspective. That’s the most “preacher” like aspect of her work. She will not explain, only inhabit. “I have refused to live/ locked in the orderly house of/ reasons and proofs.” As with many people who express non-secular, non-material, non-cynical temperaments, this can be highly divisive. To the unpersuaded, it sounds a lot like the positive thinking you see on cushions and those wooden signs people prop up in their kitchen. This is so wrong.

   Ruth Franklin
   is one of the few serious writers to have grasped what Mary Oliver is about:

   But the lives of animals—giving birth, hunting for food, dying—are Oliver’s primary focus. In comparison, the human is self-conscious, cerebral, imperfect. “There is only one question; / how to love this world,” Oliver writes

5. At her best, read in full, Mary Oliver is not a mere poet of affirmations; instead, she inhabits this spiritualist perspective so fully that the poems are truly excellent, written with the quality of a parable, or creation story. Yes, she is a preacher. Yes, that is a good thing.

   Who made the world?
   Who made the swan, and the black bear?
   Who made the grasshopper?
   This grasshopper, I mean—
   the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
   the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
   who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
   who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
   Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
   Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
   I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
   I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
   into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
   how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
   which is what I have been doing all day.
   Tell me, what else should I have done?
   Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
   Tell me, what is it you plan to do
   With your one wild and precious life?

   If you only quote the last two lines, as happens so often, then you are taking this poem out of context. We do this to Kipling too, another victim of the “middlebrow” label. But he’s still a great poet. If is still a great poem. Just because lots of people turn a poem, or a quote, into the poetic equivalent of muzak doesn’t mean the poem is in fact muzak. Read this poem again. Mary Oliver is asking that final question in a very different manner to the way it is usually asked out of context.

6. Some of the criticisms that the modernists made of the late Victorians—they only used words to fit a rhyme scheme, they were sentimental, they weren’t careful and precise enough in their language—can be made of Oliver. She sometimes resorts to familiar phrases and vague language, hence her use among those who want to be comforted, or who see art as a form of therapy (though why not?). But again compare her to the haiku writers, Sappho, the silver poets like Cowley and Herrick, Rilke, Cummings, and you will get a better idea of what she is doing. This is not aesthetic, modernist poetry of the sort that is now dominant.

7. Here are some Mary Oliver poems that I admire. “Wild Geese”, obviously, but you all know that one. Read this prose poem. Also this one. Both excellent.

   “Spring”

   In April the Morgan was bred. I was chased away.
   I heard the cries of the horses where I waited,
   And the laughter of the men.
   
   Later the farmer who owned the stallion
   Found me and said, “She’s done.
   You tell your daddy he owes me fifty dollars.”
   
   I rode her at home at her leisure
   And let her, wherever she wanted,
   Tear with her huge teeth, roughly,
   
   Blades from the fields of spring.

   “Marengo”

   Out of the sump rise the marigolds.
   From the rim of the marsh, muslin with mosquitoes,
   rises the egret, in his cloud-cloth.
   Through the soft rain, like mist, and mica,
   the withered acres of moss begin again.
   

   When I have to die, I would like to die
   on a day of rain–
   long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.

   
   And I would like to have whatever little ceremony there might be
   take place while the rain is shoveled and shoveled out of the sky,

   
   and anyone who comes must travel, slowly and with thought,
   as around the edges of the great swamp.

   “August”

   When the blackberries hang
   swollen in the woods, in the brambles
   nobody owns, I spend
   
   all day among the high
   branches, reaching
   my ripped arms, thinking
   
   of nothing, cramming
   the black honey of summer
   into my mouth; all day my body
   
   accepts what it is. In the dark
   creeks that run by there is
   this thick paw of my life darting among
   
   the black bells, the leaves; there is
   this happy tongue.

   “Landscape”

   Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that
   they have no tongues, could lecture
   all day if they wanted about
   

   spiritual patience? Isn’t it clear
   the black oaks along the path are standing
   as though they were the most fragile of flowers?
   

   Every morning I walk like this around
   the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
   ever close, I am as good as dead.
   

   Every morning, so far, I’m alive. And now
   the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
   and burst up into the sky—as though
   

   all night they had thought of what they would like
   their lives to be, and imagined
   their strong, thick wings.

   “I go down to the shore”

   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.

   “Don’t Worry”

   Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.
   How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
   before he became Saint Augustine?