Is Mary Oliver a good poet? - by Henry Oliver

This comes up every now and then. I remember someone a few years ago saying Mary Oliver was “poetry for people who don’t like poetry.” That’s not true, but even if it is, who cares? Anyway, it came up again when Maggie Zhu tweeted that Mary Oliver is “upmarket Rupi Kaur.” Zhu followed up calling Oliver a “preacher-masquerading-as-poet”. Loyal reader of The Common Reader Rachael Meager said this: I started off yesterday feeling positive towards Mary Oliver. Her work meant a lot to me circa 2019; unhappy hearing her described as middlebrow. Everyone started posting their fave Mary Oliver poem in strident defense of her. I read all of them. Every one of them was middlebrow. Rachel admires “Wild Geese”, to be clear. (Side note: you should read Rachel’s Substack, it’s great.) I think this is much closer to the truth than what Maggie Zhu said, but I want to add a few thoughts of my own. What is middlebrow? Virginia Woolf said, “The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence

This comes up every now and then. I remember someone a few years ago saying Mary Oliver was “poetry for people who don’t like poetry.” That’s not true, but even if it is, who cares? Anyway, it came up again when Maggie Zhu tweeted that Mary Oliver is “upmarket Rupi Kaur.” Zhu followed up calling Oliver a “preacher-masquerading-as-poet”. Loyal reader of The Common Reader Rachael Meager said this: I started off yesterday feeling positive towards Mary Oliver. Her work meant a lot to me circa 2019; unhappy hearing her described as middlebrow. Everyone started posting their fave Mary Oliver poem in