The fourth Poet Laureate of the United States (1996-1997), Mark Strand (born 1934) wrote poems on subjects ranging from dark and terrible wrestlings with one's fears and alter egos to joyous celebrati...
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Mark Strand was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, and did his undergraduate work at Antioch College in Ohio, where he completed his B.A. degree in 1957. During the next two years he attended Yale ...
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In the following excerpt, Bloom contends that Strand's work represents a strain of American Romanticism that is consciously Freudian and that deals primarily with the family romance.
A man&#...
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In the following review, Howard praises the clarity of Strand's focus in his poetry and contends that The Story of Our Lives is Strand's best collection.
His fourth and finest book&#x...
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In the following essay, Miklitsch maintains that the poems in the collection The Story of Our Lives are both highly original and important in terms of Strand's influence on future poets.
Wha...
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In the following essay, Gregerson contends that in Strand's later work the focus of his poetry shifts from renunciation to restoration.
“… it seems to me that we should rather ...
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In the following excerpt, Kirby examines Strand's 1973 collection, The Story of Our Lives and the 1978 collection, The Monument. Kirby comments that the first is characterized by a marked chang...
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In the following excerpt, Maio explores Strand's handling of issues of poetic voice and tone involving absence and self-negation in individual poems from Sleeping with One Eye Open, Reasons for...
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In the following essay, Berger presents a detailed explication of three poems by Strand: “Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life,” “The Next Time,” and “Great Dog Poem ...
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In the following essay, Manguso contends that in Blizzard of One Strand “attempts to explain what happens when he can't show us the subject of his meditation.”
The poems in Mar...
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In the following essay, Miller examines the connections between Strand's work and the poetry of Wallace Stevens.
Wallace Stevens has many and diverse poetic heirs—John Ashbery, Jorie ...
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In the following essay, Hamilton offers a brief analysis of the formal features of Strand's poem “The History of Poetry.”
Of Mark Strand's poems since 1990, “The ...
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In the following essay, Mitova contends that the poems in Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More are actually simply lists that seem to invite the reader “into poetry in general, and into Mark Str...
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Critical Essay by A. R. Ammons
In Mark Strand's best poems [in Sleeping with One Eye Open] a fuzzy, peripheral, half realized terror seems about to take shape. The tension is that if the terro...
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Critical Essay by Peter Stitt
[One] of the most attractive features of Mark Strand's The Late Hour is the sense of positive progression that it embodies. The first two of the volume's f...
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Critical Essay by Robert Pack
Mark Strand's Reasons for Moving … is a marvelously haunted book. It is not clear whether the speaker of these poems is haunted by what he is, what he is n...
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Critical Essay by Louis L. Martz
[Mark Strand's Darker] represents a remarkable development in depth of insight and poetic control. The two poems headed "From a Litany" show the ...
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Critical Essay by Denis Donoghue
[Mark Strand's] Darker seems to me a much stronger work than his Reasons for Moving (1968) or Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964). The strength is largely the co...
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Critical Essay by Richard Howard
Strand is both nervous and morbid, and a consideration of finality is his constant project…. In his first book, he is holding on for dear life. (pp. 508-09)
...
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Critical Essay by Harold Bloom
Five previous books have established that Mark Strand is a superb lyric poet, particularly in Darker (1970). He gives us now two new books, of which The Monument is a m...
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Critical Essay by Robert Pinsky
The deep underlying motive of Mark Strand's poetry is the solipsism or loneliness of the individual imagination, isolated from the world of memory, objects, the...
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Critical Essay by David Gullette
I had the curious feeling after reading Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970) that Strand's best poems were atypical. In Reasons for Moving I was drawn t...
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Critical Essay by Calvin Bedient
Though Mark Strand has previously shown a dark comic power to discomfort, his … volume of poems, The Late Hour, and his short prose work, The Monument, lack cl...
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Mark Strand has a common theme throughout all of his short poems found in Blizzard of One. I found Nature as the common motif. Many of the poems are interesting in this short work by Strand, and man...
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Mark Strand
Mark Strand
Critical Essay by Harold Bloom
Literary Terms in Mark Strand Poetry
