Her favorite poets included William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but it was Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems that she carried in her purse through 10th grade.

[11] For her bachelor's degree Olds returned to California where she earned her BA at Stanford University in 1964.

Following this, Olds once again moved cross country to New York, where she earned her Ph.D. in English in 1972 from Columbia University.

She wrote her doctoral dissertation on "Emerson's Prosody," because she appreciated the way he defied convention.

I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don’t do it.

On March 23, 1968, she married Dr. David Douglas Olds in New York City and, in 1969, gave birth to the first of their two children.

[13] In a review of her 2022 collection Balladz, Tristram Fane Saunders mentions the moving poems she wrote about her longtime partner, the late Carl Wallman of New Hampshire, who died in 2020.

She concluded her letter by explaining: "So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire.

I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

"[15] Following her Ph.D., Olds let go of an attachment to what she thought she knew about poetic convention and began to write about her family, abuse, and sex, focusing on the work and not the audience.

These injustices include the Armenian genocide during WWI, the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and even the death of Marilyn Monroe.

Olds' book The Wellspring (1996), shares with her previous work the use of raw language and startling images to convey truths about domestic and political violence and family relationships.

[18] In a New York Times review, Lucy McDiarmid hailed her poetry for its vision: "like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression.

Ostriker continues: "In later collections, [Olds] writes of an abusive childhood, in which miserably married parents bully and punish and silence her.