Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet, Dies at 83

Poet Mary Oliver has passed away at age 83, the Associated Press reports.

Bill Reichblum, Oliver's literary executor, said that Oliver died Thursday at her home in Hobe Sound, Florida, due to lymphoma.

Oliver was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who wrote over 15 poetry and essay collections that offered simple yet poignant reflections on the natural world. Her most recent work was the anthology Devotions, which was released in 2017. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for American Primitive and has also received the National Book Award for Poetry and the Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement, among other honors.

The Ohio native was routinely described by journalists as one of the country's finest poets, with her descriptive pictures of nature accompanying self-reflecting monologues that were easy to read and digest while remaining beautiful works of prose.

"In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change — there's never been a day that my friends haven't been able to say, and at a distance, 'There's Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook,'" she wrote in Long Life, her book of essays published in 2004. "But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel."

Her odes to nature and animal life found many fans, with the concise and descriptive pieces offering glimpses into nature, with the poet describing scenes from a peaceful field to the thundering ocean.

"[I] go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything," she wrote in Long Life.

After Oliver's death was reported, many of her fans reacted on Twitter, posting their favorite poems from Oliver, including director Ava DuVernay, who shared a quote from the late poet.

“It doesn’t have to be blue iris, it can be weeds in a vacant lot.

Just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate.

This isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks. A silence in which another voice may speak.”

- Mary Oliver, Praying pic.twitter.com/SHh1EYdU6T

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) January 17, 2019

Hillary Clinton thanked Oliver "for giving so many of us words to live by."

Thank you, Mary Oliver, for giving so many of us words to live by.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 17, 2019

Photo Credit: Getty / Kevork Djansezian