Navigating Ancestral Shores: A Study on the Revivalism of the Transcendentalist’s Reverential Treatment of Nature in Select Poems of Mary Oliver
Pulitzer Prize winner and American poet, Mary Oliver’s poetry is reminiscent of the Transcendentalist spirit of her intellectual ancestors namely Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. Oliver wrote many of her ‘nature’ poems while residing in New England, the birthing place of her Transcendentalist intellectual predecessors. Her work can be considered as a revivalistic expression of the tenets that the Transcendentalists held dear – the most striking being a poignant connection with Nature. Nature, in her poems is a pulsating life-force that she inherently identifies with, even to the extent of stubbornly seeking out Her mysteries and secrets in an optimistic desire to achieve a fluid oneness. This mysticism and reverence for Nature embodies what the Transcendentalist had set out to herald in a new dawn of intellectual life that would guide the fledging nation and leave an indelible mark on the history of American literature. This paper will attempt to showcase the reverential tone that Oliver embodies in her ‘nature’ poems.
