When deciding on a topic to create my capstone project on, I instantly knew that I wanted to work with free verse poetry. Back in my junior year of college I took an American poetry course with Professor Timothy Gray, and I quickly became drawn to the poetry of James Wright. I appreciated how vividly Wright described landscapes of the rural world, and the personal insight he would get from these various places in nature.
I expressed to Professor Gray that I was interested in writing my capstone paper to further explore Wright’s poetry, but I also wanted to look at other poets as well. This is when Professor Gray suggested I take a look at Mary Oliver, a free verse nature poet. I immediately became captivated by the sense of freedom in Oliver’s poetry, which is revealed through the revelations she received by immersing herself in the primitive world.
After I was able to narrow my search to James Wright and Mary Oliver, I began my research on both of them. I discovered that both Oliver and Wright have a connection, since they were both born and raised in suburbs in Ohio, and Oliver herself even brought up this connection in her own poem dedicated to Wright. After Wright passed away in 1980, Oliver wrote a sequence titled: Three Poems for James Wright, where she stated that she thought Ohio would “fall down” with Wright after his death.
Through my research, I was also able to discover that both Wright and Oliver overcame the various struggles life threw at them, and there is a clear theme of perseverance in both of their works.
However, I also got to discover each poet's personal style as well through this process, which does make their messages vary slightly. Wright is much more of an introspective poet, using “I” frequently in his poems, and using the scenery around him to help him through his struggle of depression. He was also a poet who appreciated listening to the various creatures, such as ants, crickets and horses, by getting to a place of stillness and silence to understand their value.
Oliver, however, is much more upfront in her poetry, often by using “you” and “we” in her work to invite the reader and to communicate directly with them. I was able to see through studying Oliver’s work that the primitive world is crucial to her, and I got to understand what exactly is meant by the primitive world.
To Oliver, the primitive world is a state of the physical; it is not a metaphor but rather being engaged with the natural world with every sense possible. Oliver is easily able to morph into this world and is quite comfortable there, especially in her Pulitzer Prize winning book of poetry, American Primitive.
Interestingly though, Wright and Oliver were both met with some criticism and not as much recognition as they deserved. Wright is argued by scholars that he is too sentimental and writes of experiences that can’t possibly be real, but I argue that the love he writes about between animals is absolutely real. As for Oliver, her blending of her poetry with the primitive world leaves little room for lines in between, which can be somewhat uncomfortable and not traditional. Yet I argue this is what makes Oliver so unique and daunting, and is especially refreshing in her work.
Overall, studying James Wright and Mary Oliver in such detail was an eye-opening experience for me, and I definitely plan to study their works more to develop my project further and my own personal understanding of them as poets. I am eager to check out more of Oliver’s newer poems from before she passed away, and as for Wright, I would like to examine his earlier works in more detail, especially since he originally was not a free verse poet. In his most famous book of poetry, The Branch Will Not Break, this is mainly where he starts writing in free verse and breaks his own barriers, but exploring his earlier works will help give me a clear contrast. Furthermore, I am eager to further research both of these free verse poets, since their work has already been so enlightening for me.
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