SOURCE: "Gerald Stern and the Return Journey," in American Poetry Review, Vol. 18, No. 5, September/October, 1989, pp. 39-46.

In the following essay, Somerville examines the function of nostalgia and memory in Stern's poetry, showing how Stern links them both to time and myth.

       We look before and after
         And pine for what is not;
       Our sincerest laughter
         With some pain is fraught;
       Our sweetest songs are those that tell
         Of saddest thoughts.
                —[Percy Bysshe] Shelley, "To a Skylark"

Nostalgia once had the status of a real disease; it was diagnosed two hundred years ago as an ailment that "leaves its victims solitary, musing, and full of sighs and moans…." During the Civil War, five thousand cases had to be hospitalized; fifty-eight died. Today's popular culture has tamed the ailment by overexposure to old clothes and old songs. Record stores now have a section called "nostalgia"; it contains the old...