Ask the Chatbot Games & Quizzes History & Society Science & Tech Biographies Animals & Nature Geography & Travel Arts & Culture ProCon Money Videos
Sharon Olds
Introduction References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics
Images
Sharon Olds
Quizzes
Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry
A Study of Poetry
4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
Famous Poets and Poetic Form
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:
Poetry: First Lines
Quick Facts
Born:
November 19, 1942, San Francisco, California, U.S. (age 83)
Awards And Honors:
Pulitzer Prize (2013)
Britannica AI Icon
Adding us as a Preferred Source tells Google you trust our content, so our articles show up more often in your Google Search, Discover feed, and AI Overviews.
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

External Websites
Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds Sharon Olds, 2009.

Sharon Olds

American poet
Written and fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
Britannica Editors
History

Sharon Olds (born November 19, 1942, San Francisco, California, U.S.) is an American poet best known for her powerful, often erotic, imagery of the body and her examination of the family.

Olds grew up in San Francisco, the daughter of an abusive alcoholic father and a weak compliant mother; her anger at her parents would influence her poetry. She studied at Stanford University (B.A., 1964) and at Columbia University (Ph.D., 1972). Thereafter she taught poetry at numerous schools and in workshops. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for her work in 1981.

Olds’s first collection, Satan Says (1980), describes her early sexual life in frank language. The book was praised as a daring, auspicious debut. In The Dead and the Living (1984), which received several major poetry awards, she refined her poetic voice. Her poems honouring the dead encompass both family members and victims of political violence; those addressed to the living continue to examine the life of the body. She further developed this theme in The Gold Cell (1987). The poet presents arguments against her parents’ marriage in “I Go Back to May 1937” and explores their relationship in other poems in the collection. The Matter of This World: New and Selected Poems (1987) and The Father (1992) continue her intimate meditations—free of bitterness and self-pity—on her own life, as does The Wellspring (1996), a collection of poems treating marital and parental relationships.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.
By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry
Britannica Quiz
A Study of Poetry

Olds’s later collections included Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Unswept Room (2002), One Secret Thing (2008), Odes (2016), Arias (2019), and Balladz (2022). For Stag’s Leap (2012), which chronicles the 1997 dissolution of her marriage, she was awarded both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2016 Olds received the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.