Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
21 - The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
Summary
Mary Oliver's poetry regards nature with a pioneer's wary eye. Not for her the enthusiasm, which often looks like hysteria these days, of the nature- can- dono- wrong school of thought, or the worship of natural forces by people who applaud the purity and balance of geological catastrophes, such as tidal waves and avalanches, while dismissing as corruption all valuable and even splendid human accomplishments, such as architecture. Oliver's poetry takes note of a natural murderousness. The lines report the slaughters to be found in any sylvan utopia. They limn a systematic violence. Her aptly horrific sketch of “the soft rope of a watermoccasin,” for instance, in “Death at a Great Distance,” shows it slipping into a tropical pool “where some bubbles / on the surface of that underworld announced / a fatal carelessness,” and where “death blurted out of that perfectly arranged mouth.” The idea of balance here is not ecology so much as a commonsensical honesty.
It is also that of a general solidity of aesthetic judgment. Oliver's poems demonstrate an awareness of themselves as art, acknowledging a drastic though often scanted difference between art and propaganda, to wit, that while art may affirm certain values, it cannot set about promoting them, no matter how excellent they may be, without at once surrendering its very lifeblood to dullness, clichés, and pomposity. Pompous finger- wagging is almost entirely missing from these two volumes. If their larger theme is a rural, natural world, with wolves, crows, bears, roses and ponds penned in vigorous portrait poems, their method is an innocence of exploration. All is clean air among these stanzas, and the innocence is that of a style refreshingly unstained by sleightof- hand messages to the reader, snobberies of doctrine and scurrilities of selfpity. When this works well, what we are given is the innocence of a mirror, one that apprehends nature while shrinking from eccentric distortion— what Schiller may have meant by the smartly naïve in art— and one that is devoid of the usual modernist and postmodernist contempt for the language of ordinary human beings.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Poetry and FreedomDiscoveries in Aesthetics, 1985–2018, pp. 139 - 142Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020