Mary Oliver
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winning Poet
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay died on October 19, 1950; she was 58. It was a too short, turbulent, diligent life—a life of life, a life of work. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She was the chosen representative figure of the ’20s, beautiful, flamboyant, honorable to the spirits of love and of art, yet, in those early years, mischievous, even racy. In book after book, she wrote more deeply, more quietly, with a lyrical finery, a feminist stance, an affinity with the natural world, an understanding of the necessity in the world for kindness, for participation.
The critics, with the exception of Edmund Wilson, have mostly hashed her work, making it smaller by emphasis on the early poems. Who remembers her libretto for Deems Taylor’s opera The King’s Henchman, or the plays, or the many elegant sonnets and poems in later books such as Buck in the Snow; Huntsman, What Quarry; and the posthumous Mine the Harvest?
Read more of “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” by Mary Oliver, on Beacon Broadside, October 19, 2007.
Photographs
 – Mary Oliver, Summer 1964. Photo by Molly Malone Cook, from Our World (Beacon Press, 2007). |
Praise
“One of the astonishing aspects of Oliver’s work is the consistency of tone over this long period [of her career]. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets . . . There is no complaint in Ms. Oliver’s poetry, no whining, but neither is there the sense that life is in any way easy . . . These poems sustain us rather than divert us. Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward.”
—Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review