Oliver vs. Baudelaire

Mary Oliver, who died recently, has a certain following. Even friends of mine, smart academics, like her work. Usually they say something like, "I'm not a poetry expert, but... "

The main feature of her work is a what we could call the aspirational subject position.  In other words, the speaker of the poem is a version of one's "best self," complete with the requisite moral earnestness. People have written that those of us who look down on her do so because her poetry is too easy to understand, or that she writes about "old-fashioned" subjects like God and nature. There is a New Yorker piece about "what Mary Oliver's critics don't get" that say this. (This article says that she writes in "blank verse," when what is meant is free verse.)  But, really, this writers doesn't get the objection to Mary Oliver at the most fundamental level.

Speaking for myself, the reason I don't like her work is because it embodies more facile elements of that sort of self-improvement culture in a very sentimental way. Of course, the reader (or a certain type of reader) wants to identify with this aspirational model of selfhood. That's the whole satisfaction of her work. Even her famous poem with the lines "You do not have to be good..." is an example of this. The speaker says we don't have to be good, but is essentially congratulating herself on her moral strenuousness.  In this culture you rhetorically embrace the fact that you are imperfect, but you never actually paint yourself in a bad or ridiculous light. There are no chinks in the armor.

An exaggeratedly non-ideal self, like that appearing in Baudelaire's spleen poems, is the other extreme. I'm thinking of one in which he compares himself to a cruel prince in a rainy country. Now it might be interesting to think that both Oliver and and Baudelaire suffered from depression. Rhetorically, you can embrace the way depression makes you feel bad about yourself; or you can cover it up with a veneer of sentimentality and prettiness. Both are rhetorical strategies; neither is honest or genuine, really, but I object more to the dishonesty of Oliver's poetry. I've known people who have moral objections to Baudelaire, but he is not trying to paint himself in a good light.  You have to object to his subjectivity, because it is being presented to you already in a way that you might will to object to.  Baudelaire is also saying "you do not have to be good," but he accepts that there are consequences.