Upstream: Selected Essays

At a 2001 event coordinated by the Lanan Foundation, Mary Oliver stood in front of an audience and read one of her most famous and enduring poems: “Wild Geese.” Audio recordings of the event reveal the clear and unfussy voice of the notoriously reclusive writer. In the poem, Oliver offers an invitation to engage with the world. Her connection to nature was the heartbeat of her work. She learned from nature, worshiped it, and grieved alongside it. The poet’s positioning as a nature writer places her within an important American literary tradition, one that is most often associated with figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Annie Dillard.

The roots of American nature writing lie largely in the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. Emerson and Thoreau viewed nature as a gateway to self-knowledge and transformation, often treating the landscape as a text that reveals universal truths. Thoreau’s Walden is the expression of nature as teacher, and the writer’s time in solitude made him feel as though he was ready to learn. In Emerson’s “Over-Soul,” the essayist famously argued that nature restores the soul and opens the mind.