Upstream: Selected Essays

Upstream (2016) is an essay collection by Mary Oliver, featuring essays on the inner and outer landscapes that shape a creative life. Moving between memories, natural observations, and reflections on art, she describes how early solitude, reading, and wandering the woods formed her vocation as a poet. Encounters with turtles, foxes, herons, and ponds teach her that attention is a form of devotion, and that the natural world offers both solace and instruction. The book is a meditation on The Discipline of Being Different, The Kinship of All Wild Things, and Attention as Responsible Practice.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was an American poet and nature writer whose work is widely regarded for its accessibility, attention, and clarity. Oliver’s work has received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

This guide uses the 2016 paperback edition from Penguin Random House LLC.

Summary

In Upstream, poet Mary Oliver explores the moral and spiritual dimensions of living close to nature through a series of autobiographical and lyrical essays. She recounts childhood wanderings, the evolution of her writing life, and her deep engagement with the creatures that surround her. Her observations of turtles nesting, animals feeding, or fish surviving become reflections on appetite, vulnerability, and the delicate balance between taking and giving. Oliver positions herself as both witness and participant, acknowledging the responsibilities that come with attention: To see clearly, act gently, and accept one’s own wildness.

Section 1 introduces Oliver’s major themes, tracing the formation of Oliver’s artistic and spiritual sensibilities through her lifelong intimacy with the natural world. In “Upstream,” she recalls a childhood walk that awakened her sense of belonging to something vast and interconnected, shaping her conviction that attention to nature is the foundation of love. “My Friend Walt Whitman” depicts her early feeling of being different and her discovery of Whitman as a literary companion who taught her that poetry is a way of seeking truth. “Staying Alive” offers a series of fox-centered vignettes that reveal how the wild world, along with books, provided refuge from a difficult childhood and taught her empathy, wonder, and perspective. The last essay explores the conditions required for creative work, distinguishing between the social self and the eternal, creative self that demands solitude and loyalty. Taken together, the essays show how nature, literature, and disciplined attention shaped Oliver’s identity as a writer.

In Section 2, Oliver reflects on appetite, empathy, and the responsibilities of living among other creatures. A day spent fishing ends in relief when she and her partner catch nothing, revealing her ambivalence about taking life even while feeling the tug of desire and hunger. That tension reappears as she tends to an injured duck, releases the still-living sand eels discovered during cleaning a fish, and intervenes to protect a shark from careless beachgoers. Each encounter becomes a lesson in attentiveness and restraint. In the rhythms of the animals around her home—frogs, herons, foxes, geese—Oliver finds a way of living that resists human haste. Oliver repeatedly measures her own appetites against the needs and vulnerabilities of the creatures she meets, concluding that ethical living requires both acknowledging desire and honoring the interconnected lives that surround us.

Section 3 reflects on the writers who shaped Oliver’s imagination and her understanding of artistic purpose. She turns first to Emerson, seeing him as a thinker who insisted on self-trust and inward clarity. She then considers Poe, whose work reveals the darker corridors of the human psyche. Poe represents the willingness to confront fear, obsession, and the uncanny aspects of inner life. Whitman emerges as a figure of the spiritual side of life, and Wordsworth reveals how attention to ordinary experience can deepen the soul. His belief in the spiritual power of nature resonates strongly with Oliver’s own. Together, these four writers form a lineage through which she understands wonder, discipline, and the calling of the creative life.

In Section 4, Oliver explores how attention, fear, beauty, and creative labor shape a fully lived life. Across these essays, she considers how encounters with animals—whether fierce, delicate, or mysterious—reveal essential truths about the nature of being. Oliver also meditates on the discipline required to transform experiences into art. She emphasizes the quiet, steady work of shaping a life of observation, a life capable of receiving the world without haste. Winter landscapes, brief encounters with creatures such as a gull, and moments of spiritual vertigo all become opportunities to understand the self more honestly.

Section 5 is comprised of a single essay on Provincetown. Oliver brings her ideas into the human realm, showing how the town of Provincetown embodies shared experience, as well as both beauty and terror.