The latter described her poems as "graceful and self-assured, serene even when they treat the ordinary agonies of life ... richly complex without throwing complexities in the way of the reader." The title poem, "No Voyage," won first prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1963. For subsequent work, she received the Devil's Advocate Award from the Poetry Society of America (1968), a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (1972-1973), the Shelley Memorial Award (1970), the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award (1973), the Ohioana Book Award (1973), the Journalism Award from
Commonwealth (1978), the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature (1979), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), a Pulitzer Prize (1984) for
American Primitive, and a National Book Award (1992) for
New and Selected Poems. Her work has been acclaimed by Stanley Kunitz, Robert Demott, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others. She has just begun to give readings and workshops on the college circuit; her first academic post has been a Mather Visiting Professorship at Case Western Reserve University (winter/spring 1980).
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of a teacher, Edward William Oliver, and Helen M. Vlasak Oliver, Mary Oliver studied at Ohio State University for one year and then spent a year at Vassar.
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