A Patroller of Wetlands

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. V. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. She briefly attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s, but did not receive a degree at either college.

She was influenced by the poet Edna St.Vincent Millay, , and as a teenager, lived for a brief while in her home, where she helped Millay's sister Norma organize the papers the deceased Millay left behind. It is rumored that during this time she had a questionable relationship with Sarah Whittier. During the early 1980s, Oliver taught at Case Western Reserve University,. In 1984, her collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

In 1986, she moved to Bucknell University where she was honored with the title "Poet In Residence." In 1991, she served as the Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. She then moved to Bennington, Vermont, , where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington until 2001. Oliver's partner, Molly Malone Cook, , served as her literary agent until Cook's death in 2005. Oliver currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Oliver’s poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England. Influenced by both Walt Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her clear and poignant observances of the natural world. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales.

Maxine Kumin calls Oliver "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms" and "an indefatigable guide to the natural world." Oliver has also been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shares an affinity for solitude and interior monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release.

Although she has been criticized for writing poetry that assumes a dangerously close relationship of women with nature, she finds the self is only strengthened through an immersion with nature. As her creativity is stirred by nature, Oliver is an avid walker, pursuing inspiration on foot. For Oliver, walking is part of the poetic process. Oliver is also known for her unadorned language and accessible themes.

The author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, Oliver’s first collection of poems, Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963. She has since published numerous books, including Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006); Why I Wake Early (2004); Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (2003); Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999); West Wind (1997); White Pine (1994). In 1992, her volume, New and Selected Poems (1992), won the National Book award. She won the Christopher Award and the L.L.Winship /PEN New England Award for her piece House of Light (1990). Her volume American Primitive (1983) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. The first and second parts of her The Leaf and the Cloud were selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 1999 and The Best American Poetry 2000, respectively.

Honors Oliver has received include Lannan Literary Award for poetry (1992) the National Book Award for Poetry(1992) for her collection New and Selected Poems, for her collection American Primitive, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1980) , and the Shelley Memorial Award (1969/70) of the Poetry Society of America.

Critical Reviews

Poet Mary Oliver is an "indefatigable guide to the natural world," wrote Maxine Kumin in Women's Review of Books, "particularly to its lesser-known aspects."Reviewing Dream Work for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America's finest poets, as "visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson…[she is] among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey."

American Primitive, according to New York Times Book Review's Bruce Bennet, "insists on the primacy of the physical.

"Holly Prado of Los Angeles Times Book Review applauded Oliver's original voice when she wrote that American Primitive "touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.

"Colin Lowndes of the Toronto Globe & Mail considered Oliver "a poet of worked-for reconciliations" whose volume deals with thresholds, or the "points at which opposing forces meet."

In her article “The Language of nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver,” Diane S. Bond said that “few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver’s work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain skeptical "that identification with nature can empower women.”

In The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Sue Russell stated that “Mary Oliver will never be a balladeer of contemporary lesbian life in the vein of Marilyn Hacker, or an important political thinker like Adrienne Rich; but the fact that she chooses not to write from a similar political or narrative stance makes her all the more valuable to our collective culture.”

Bibliography
No Voyage, and Other Poems
The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems
The Night Traveler Twelve Moons)
Sleeping in the Forest, (poetry chapbook)
American Primitive
Dream Work
Provincetown (limited edition with woodcuts by Barnard Taylor)House of Light)
New and Selected Poems)
A Poetry Handbook
White Pine: (Poems and Prose Poems)
Blue Pastures West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems)
Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse
Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
The Leaf and the Cloud
What Do We Know
Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays
Why I Wake Early: New Poems
Blue Iris: Poems and Essays
Long Life: Essays and Other Writings New and Selected Poems, volume two
At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver (2006, audio cd)
Thirst: Poems Our World - with photographs by Molly Malone Cook
Red Bird
Evidence

A man with a lover's quarrel with the world.

Robert Frost

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California to journalist, William Prescott Frost, Jr. and Isabelle Moodie.His mother, was of Scottish descent, and his father, a descendant of colonist Nicholas Frost from Tiverton, Devon, England who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana

Frost's father was a teacher and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (later merged into the San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessful candidate for the city tax collector. After his father's death in May 5, 1885, in due time the family moved across-country to Lawrence, Massachusetts under the patronage of (Robert's grandfather) William Frost, Sr., who was an overseer at a New England mill. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892. Frost's mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult.

Despite his later association with rural life, Frost grew up in the city, and published his first poem in his high school's magazine. He attended Dartmouth College long eough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs including delivering newspapers and factory labor. He did not enjoy these jobs at all, feeling his true calling as a poet.

In 1894 he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly: An Elegy" (published in the November 8, 1894 edition of the New York Independent) for fifteen dollars. Proud of this accomplishment he proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but she demurred, wanting to finish college (at St.Lawrence University) before they married.

Frost then went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, and asked Elinor again upon his return. Having graduated she agreed, and they were married at Harvard University^], where he attended liberal arts studies for two years.

He did well at Harvard, but left to support his growing family. Grandfather Frost had, shortly before his death, purchased a farm for the young couple in Derry, New Hampshire,; and Robert worked the farm for nine years, while writing early in the mornings and producing many of the poems that would later become famous. Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful and he returned to education as an English teacher, at Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University) in Plymouth , New Hampshire.

In 1912 Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain, living first in Glasgow before settling in Beaconsfield outside London. His first book of poetry, A Boy's Will, was published the next year. In England he made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock Poets), T.E.Hulme and Ezra Pound. Pound would become the first American to write a (favorable) review of Frost's work. Surrounded by his peers, Frost wrote some of his best work while in England.

As World War I began, Frost returned to America in 1915. He bought a farm in, Franconia, New Hampshire , where he launched a career of writing, teaching, and lecturing. This family homestead served as the Frosts' summer home until 1938, and is maintained today as 'The Frost Place', a museum and poetry conference site at Franconia. During the years 1916–20, 1923–24, and 1927–1938, Frost taught English at Amherst College, Massachusetts, notably encouraging his students to account for the sounds of the human voice in their writing.

For forty-two years, from 1921 to 1963, Frost spent almost every summer and fall teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College, , at the mountain campus at Ripton, Vermont.. He is credited as a major influence upon the development of the school and its writing programs; the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference gained renown during Frost's tenure there.

The college now owns and maintains his former Ripton farmstead as a national historic site near the Bread Loaf campus. In 1921 Frost accepted a fellowship teaching post at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he resided until 1927; while there he was awarded a lifetime appointment at the University as a Fellow in Letters.

The Robert Frost Ann Arbor home is now situated at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Frost returned to Amherst in 1927. In 1940 he bought a 5-acre (2.0 ha) plot in South Miami, Florida, naming it Pencil Pines; he spent his winters there for the rest of his life.

Harvard's 1965 alumni directory indicates Frost received an honorary degree there. He also received honorary degrees from Bates College and from Oxford and Cambridge universities; and he was the first person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College

During his lifetime the Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, and the main library of Amherst College were named after him.

Frost was 86 when he spoke and performed a reading of his poetry at the inauguration of President John F.Kennedy on January 20, 1961.. Some two years later, on January 29, 1963, he died, in Boston, of complications from prostate surgery. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His epitaph reads, "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

Robert Frost's personal life was plagued with grief and loss. His father died of tuberculosis in 1885, when Frost was 11, leaving the family with just $8. Frost's mother died of cancer in 1900. In 1920, Frost had to commit his younger sister, Jeanie, to a mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently ran in Frost's family, as both he and his mother suffered from depression, , and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost's wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression.

Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son Elliot (1896–1904, died of cholera}, daughter Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899–1983), son Carol (1902–1940, committed suicide), daughter Irma (1903–1967), daughter Marjorie (1905–1934, died as a result of puerperal fever after childbirth), and daughter Elinor Bettina (died three days after birth in 1907). Only Lesley and Irma outlived their father. Frost's wife, who had heart problems throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937, and died of heart failure in 1939

True clarity reaches the heights

Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings was born on July 20, 1926, died on October 2001,was an English poet noted for her clarity of style and simplicity of literary approach. Her Roman Catholicism coloured much of her work.

Jennings was born in Lincolnshire, but her family moved to Florida when she was six; There she later attended St.Anne's college. After graduation, she became a librarian.

She is not generally regarded as an innovator. Her work displays a simplicity of metre and rhyme shared with Phlip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn, all members of English poets known as The Movement.

She always made it clear that, whilst her life, which included a spell of severe mental illness, contributed to the themes contained within her work, she did not write explicitly autobiographical poetry.

Only one thing must be cast out," wrote the poet Elizabeth Jennings, who has died aged 75, "and that is the vague. Only true clarity reaches to the heights and the depths of human, and more than human, understanding." The words are from her study of 20th-century authors, Seven Men Of Vision (1976), which included reflections on Yeats, DH Lawrence, Pasternak and St-Exupéry; but they sum up perfectly the aspirations and achievements of her own poetry.

Elizabeth's father, Henry Cecil Jennings, was chief medical officer for her birthplace of Boston, Lincolnshire, whose environs - "a flat land of sugarbeet and tulips" - were to be vividly recreated in some of her later poems. When she was six, the family moved to Oxford, where she attended Oxford high school and discovered poetry. Delighted, at first, by the rhythms of Chesterton's Battle Of Lepanto, she soon moved on to Keats and Coleridge, and began to write her own poems.

When she was 13, the second world war broke out; at about the same time, she began to find religion - she was born a Catholic - "a real and important part of my life, and because it was important, it tended to give me a lot of worries". Spiritual concerns and a sense of vulnerability, often issuing in a profound sensitivity to the suffering of others, would become important elements in her output.

After reading English at St Anne's College, Oxford, Jennings became a librarian at Oxford city library. Poetry was, by now, her overriding interest, and her first collection, Poems (1953), published by the Fantasy Press, drew the attention of Robert Conquest, who included her work with that of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, John Wain and others in his 1956 New Lines anthology, launching what became known as "The Movement".

Jennings was the sole female contributor, and the short, first poem in her section of the book, Delay (which remained the opener of all her subsequent collected and selected volumes) had the unmistakable note of a classic.

From its opening scientific proposition, "The radiance of that star that leans on me/ Was shining years ago", to its sad and muted conclusion that "love arrived may find us somewhere else", the eight-line poem epitomized the path her work would take: the path of flawless traditional verse-technique, sharp imagery, logical thought and emotional sensitivity.

"The Movement", if it was one, faded from prominence as poets went their separate ways, but Jennings continued, with remarkable tenacity, to work in her own deceptively simple style, developing a uniquely personal voice.

She left librarianship to become a publisher's reader for Chatto and Windus from 1958 to 1960, and thereafter wrote regular poetry reviews for the Daily Telegraph. Meanwhile, poems were written steadily and prolifically - "I write fast and revise very little," she confessed - with a new volume appearing every two or three years, an oeuvre which amounted at last to nearly 30 books.

Jennings' work, though consistent in tone, was not repetitious. There was a steady growth in emotional intensity, and in her willingness to tackle uncomfortable subjects, and each volume contained at least a few poems of startling power, as in One Flesh (published in The Mind Has Mountains, 1966), where the sadly and lovingly described elderly couple "Lying apart now, each in a separate bed" are identified at last as the poet's parents, "Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold."

A breakdown in the early 1960s resulted in some ill-judged experimental poems, later suppressed, in jagged typographical forms, but also in the superb Sequence In Hospital, published in Recoveries (1964), which explores the experience of hospitalization with unsparing clarity: "What to say first? I learnt I was afraid/ Fear became absolute and I became/ Subject to it; it beckoned, I obeyed." Travel in Italy led to a lasting engagement with Italian culture and a translation of The Sonnets Of Michelangelo (1961), which is still the standard version and remains unsurpassed.

Becoming, almost without noticing it, one of Britain's most popular poets, Jennings was also, from the 1960s, an important mentor to generations of student poets, who would be invited for tea and sympathetic criticism at her modest north Oxford lodgings, whose every horizontal surface was crowded with a fantastic array of china knick-knacks, glass animals, doll's house furniture and musical boxes - the "collections" she gave as her hobby in Who's Who.

She never married, though there was an early engagement, and Oxford remained the centre of her world. But, within modest geographical limits, she lived a life rich in culture and friendship. She found poetry readings an ordeal, and avoided most literary gatherings. None the less, she was a much-loved part of the Oxford scene until the mid-90s. A familiar figure on the bus to Stratford-upon-Avon, she rarely missed a new production of Shakespeare; a connoisseur of ice-cream, she was a regular at the Häagen-Daz's ice-cream parlour. So avid was her film going that her local cinema, in Walton Street, was rumoured to have given her a free pass for life.

Her later work showed increased breadth and vigour. From the aptly named Extending The Territory (1985) onwards, she often wrote poems in flowing, free-verse lines, recollecting childhood and celebrating nature with a thoughtful nostalgia reminiscent of Rilke: "I watched as a child the slow/ Leaves turning and taking the sun, and the autumn bonfires,/ The whips of wind blowing a landscape away./ Always it was the half-seen, the just-heard which enthralled."

She received the WH Smith literary award in 1987 for her second Collected Poems (the first had appeared in 1967, and so ruthless was her self-criticism that the later volume was actually shorter), and, in 1992, the CBE. Despite a gradual decline in health, she continued to write with undiminished vigour and sharpness.

Delay by Elizabeth Jennings

The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else

Absence by Elizabeth Jennings

I visited the place where we last met.
Nothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended,
The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;
There was no sign that anything had ended
And nothing to instruct me to forget.

The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,
Singing an ecstasy I could not share,
Played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these
Pleasures there could not be a pain to bear
Or any discord shake the level breeze.

It was because the place was just the same
That made your absence seem a savage force,
For under all the gentleness there came
An earthquake tremor: Fountain, birds and grass
Were shaken by my thinking of your name

Her last volume, Timely Issues, published earlier this year, characteristically contains not only tributes to Hopkins, Traherne and Robert Graves but a poem of shrewd advice "To Any Newish Poet".