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. He calls nature the “prophet” which offers guidance toward right action. Meanwhile, 200 miles from Emerson and Thoreau, the poet Walt Whitman saw himself not as a student of nature, but as a part of it. In “Song of Myself“ and “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman calls for the removing of barriers so that the self may dissolve into nature.

Mary Oliver inherits many of these ideologies. Like Thoreau, she champions solitude, wandering, and awareness; like Emerson, she believes the natural world holds lessons about both humility and transcendence. From Whitman, she inherits her unity with the natural world. However, Oliver diverges from the Transcendentalists and Whitman because she emphasizes noticing rather than finding universal truths. Rather than teaching her the hidden truths of life, nature often leaves Oliver with only questions. In her book Dog Songs, the author celebrates the lives and mourns the losses of her canine friends. She watches her dog Luke smell the ground and realizes he knows more about the world than she does.

Another key comparison emerges with Annie Dillard, whose Pilgrim at Tinker Creek reinvigorated American nature writing with its blend of mysticism, theological reflection, and visceral detail. Dillard, like Oliver, is an ecstatic observer, but her communion with nature sometimes scales toward fear. Oliver, by contrast, tends to soften the edges of violence in the natural world. Her world is one in which the daily appearance of a goldfinch or a fox can recalibrate connection and one’s sense of meaning.

Oliver reimagines American nature writing for contemporary readers. She inherits the Transcendentalists’ reverence and Dillard’s reflective observation, but she distills them into a voice that is gentler, more accessible, and more open. Her work insists that nature is not separate from human life but woven through it. When she walks through the woods—just as Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Dillard did—she immerses herself through attention. Unlike her nature writing contemporaries, Oliver sees herself as part of a collective experience shared by all living things, an experience of struggling, joy, companionship, and grief.