mary oliver – the poet whose bad, unsafe childhood sent her into the woods, and who turned looking closely there into a whole way of living.

role

american poet

known for

the summer day (1990)

in one line

pay attention. be astonished. tell about it.

save

the short version

born 1935 in maple heights, ohio; died 2019 in florida, at 83. pulitzer 1984, national book award 1992, and by 2007 the best-selling poet in america.

she called it 'a very bad childhood — for everybody, every member of the household' and said she 'escaped it, barely, with years of trouble'. she disclosed abuse and mostly left it there; so do we.

'the only record i broke in school was truancy. i went to the woods a lot.' she built little shelters out there. 'i think it saved my life.'

at 17 she turned up at the house of the late poet edna st. vincent millay and spent years helping sort her papers. there she met the photographer molly malone cook, her partner for over forty years, until cook died in 2005.

walking and looking became the poems. 'tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?' and, from a poem called sometimes: 'instructions for living a life: / pay attention. / be astonished. / tell about it.'

for when nothing means anything and you can't imagine a plan big enough to fix that — she's the one who says you don't need a plan. you need to go outside and look at one thing.

go deeper — their stories on the site

the only record i broke

a bad house, a lot of truancy, and a habit of walking out into the woods to look at things. that habit became some of the most-read poems in the country.

5 min read · opens right here ›

the full story

oliver almost never gave interviews, which makes the two she did give about her childhood — maria shriver in 2011, krista tippett in 2015 — carry a lot of weight. what she said was plain: 'i had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. so i made a world out of words. and it was my salvation.' and: 'it was a very bad childhood — for everybody, every member of the household, not just myself, i think — and i escaped it, barely, with years of trouble.' she disclosed sexual abuse and said she could only handle that material in three or four poems. she was restrained about it. this page is too.

what she was clear and repetitive about was what she did instead of collapsing. she left the house. 'the only record i broke in school was truancy. i went to the woods a lot.' she built small hiding places in the woods and marsh near home — a world outside the reach of the household. 'i think it saved my life. to this day, i don't care for the enclosure of buildings.' and: 'i got saved by poetry, and i got saved by the beauty of the world.'

at 17 the escape turned literary: she went to austerlitz, new york, to the estate of edna st. vincent millay, who'd just died, befriended her sister, and spent six or seven years helping sort the papers. it's there she met molly malone cook, a photographer, who became her partner for over forty years, mostly in provincetown, until cook's death in 2005 — a loss oliver wrote about directly.

then the poems, for fifty years, and they are basically the practice of a girl in the woods, matured: walk, look at one thing closely, write it down. 'the summer day' watches a single grasshopper eat sugar out of her hand and then turns on you: 'tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?' 'wild geese' opens with a permission that's the opposite of earning your way back: 'you do not have to be good.' and 'sometimes' boils the whole thing to three lines: 'instructions for living a life: / pay attention. / be astonished. / tell about it.'

she never said the woods erased what happened. 'barely'. 'years of trouble'. she said they let her keep living, and later gave her a vocation. honest notes: the details of the abuse come from secondary write-ups of the shriver interview, so we keep to her own words. no health claims — she had lung cancer in 2012, treated, and died of lymphoma in 2019; walking didn't cure anything and nobody says it did.