Gerald Stern has set out to exorcise sadness and guilt by undertaking large poem after large poem, evoking the ironic power of pathos. He rejects decoration as poetic dishonesty. Stern is less concerned with changing from book to book, or even from poem to poem, than he is with continuing to express himself in the only way he knows, by letting his feelings take over. With a sense of mission that obviates art for its own sake, he distinguishes nostalgia from bathos as "not merely something tender and sad but [having] great psychic roots with true and terrifying aspects of rupture and separation" ("Notes from the River," American Poetry Review, September/October 1983). This sentiment conjures an image of the biblical fall. Stern continues to plumb the past, maintaining that "we live in grief and ecstasy," that "it is our justice" ("The Goons Are Leaving," in Rejoicings, 1973).

Stern educated...