The Poet Laureate of Pinterest

Committed anxious types like me rarely find a poem opening as enticing as this one from the late Mary Oliver: I worried a lot.

Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was taught, and if not how shall I correct it? Why yes, I have worried about that: Will the natural order of things suddenly turn against itself? And what can I, a small, unremarkable being, do to fix it? The poem’s troubles go on to cover aging, illness, regret.

And then, with a sigh, it resolves itself.

“Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. / And I gave it up.

And took my old body / and went out into the morning, / and sang.” Much of Oliver’s now-famed poetry, including “ I Worried ,” sidles up right next to the reader, assumes a strong kinship, and then doles out a dollop of wisdom that might be interpreted as advice.

Oliver rarely commands, but she frequently—especially in her most-shared work—offers statements or questions that read as counsel for the weary.

Among many other examples, she slips “instructions for living a life” inside her poem “Sometimes”: “ Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it. ” “You do not have to be good,” begins the oft-quoted “Wild Geese.” And there is her more graceful take on YOLO, from “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Prompts such as these turned Oliver from a celebrated scribbler in the 1990s to a lyrical sage in the aughts to today’s still-reigning poet laureate of Pinterest.

Her juiciest bits of guidance bounce around on social media like Mel Robbins quotes and are sold on mugs and T-shirts.

There’s the burgundy corduroy cap that reads Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. and the bumper sticker (from the official Mary Oliver Shop) emblazoned with Joy is not made to be a crumb .

An upcoming PBS documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World , knows that popularity has made the artist’s reputation fraught, as popularity often does.

It gently considers the question of whether someone so beloved by poetry neophytes can also earn the adulation of the critic class.

As the writer Ruth Franklin points out in the film , Oliver never received a full-length review from The New York Times during her decades-long publishing career, even though that career included a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Award.

The attention eventually paid to her work seemed to come with an asterisk, as if to designate it as beloved and therefore depthless.