HISTORICAL PROFILE Mary Oliver
On January 17 of this year, the great American poet Mary Oliver died at the age of 83. By the time of her death she was that rarest of things in the world of poets: a commercial success— though she herself never cared much about money. She had always considered too many possessions a distraction from the creative life. “I have a notion,” she once said, “that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.” One might consider her success an anomaly in an age that has relegated poetry to the fringes of culture, especially since her subject was a natural world that few of us are in touch with any more, her style devotional and ecstatic in an increasingly rational, technological society. She might easily have been dismissed as an out-of-touch relic. Yet perhaps it is those very characteristics that explain her popularity: she spoke to a longing that many people feel for a
