The Journey

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child sexual abuse.

Oliver has been inspired by various poets. One source of inspiration was working with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister, Norma, on the poet’s papers. Millay was openly bisexual, and Oliver lived with her female partner for over 40 years; both poets were part of the LGBTQ+ community. In her essays, Oliver writes about being strongly influenced by Walt Whitman, another LGBTQ+ poet. She thinks of him as a friend and as family, as well as adopts his ideas that poetry is a green space, or holy place, for experiencing emotions and can serve as a companion. Poetry can be part of discovering and following the internal knowledge that Oliver advocates for in “The Journey.”

Oliver also drew inspiration from Emily Dickinson. Both women wrote about the natural spaces in Massachusetts and kept their personal lives private. They both used em dashes to prioritize internal reflections over blindly following the voices of others. Like Oliver, Dickinson’s poetic work examines the transition between nature and artifice. In “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” the snake and its environment are characterized in terms of people and indoor dwellings, with the snake itself being a comb. The snake, in obscuring the natural and artificial, also implies the divide between life and death. Building on these pairs, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” uses naturalistic imagery to describe the process of grieving. Grief makes natural things, such as the body and the sky, mechanical, while making unnatural things, such as clocks, natural. Oliver similarly explores such themes in her poems.

Oliver’s poems embody characteristics from Romantic Era that included poets such as William Blake, John Keats, and Percy Shelley. This is, in part, due to her exaltation of nature. Biographically, Oliver named her dog Percy because she loved Shelley’s poetry. In terms of literature, Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark” explores the theme of the power of nature using rain imagery. This can be compared to the storm and stars that Oliver includes in “The Journey.”