Documentary filmmaker Sasha Waters (Gary Winograd: All Things are Photographable) interviews a who’s who of poets and enlists an array of stars — Stephen Colbert, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi — to discuss and read aloud the work of a beloved queer poet in Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World.

In the doc, made for the PBS series American Masters where it airs on August 25, Waters delves deep into Oliver’s life and influences (Whitman, Emerson, Keats) tracing her development as a poet from a childhood in Ohio scarred by sexual abuse to her precocious reaching out, at age 17, to the sister of Edna St Vincent Millay and the years that followed of her working and living with the Millay sisters at their home, a farmhouse known as Steepletop estate in Austerlitz, New York, her tenure in Greenwich Village, her longtime residence in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and her eventual move to Hobe Sound, Florida. Along the way she met her longtime life partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, cultivated friendships with any number of notables (filmmaker John Waters, novelist Norman Mailer, California First Lady Maria Shriver), and produced poetry that spoke deeply to generations. The film not only surveys Oliver’s fellow poets and documents reactions to her work from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, but also takes note of how an entire eighth grade class from a middle school in Santa Barbara, California, wrote her appreciative letters.

But not everyone was impressed; some among the poetry demimonde expressed skepticism, if not outright disdain. That didn’t stop Oliver gaining national prominence, starting with a glowing review from Joyce Carol Oates and accelerating when she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for the collection American Primitive. Perhaps her most celebrated — or, at least, wide-quoted — work is the poem “The Summer’s Day,” which has a peculiar power over some of the film’s interviewees, including Colbert, who can’t seem to get through a recitation of the poem without choking up. An essayist as well poet, Oliver had a reputation for reclusiveness, but in her later life she embraced her role as a public figure. What we see of her late life and career show Oliver opening up, bit by bit, but it’s Waters’ film that creates an in-depth and often surprising portrait of a woman whose words meant so much to so many… but whom her admiring readers, until now, might not have had a chance to get to know.

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is currently available on premium streaming services. The documentary airs on American Masters on PBS on August 25, 2026.