ABSTRACT
A winner of major awards, including the National Book Awardfor Poetry for This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), Gerald Stern has been a strong and independent voice in later 20th-century American poetry. Not associated with anyone school or group of poets, his work is both ecstatic and sorrowful as it celebrates the mystery of life and experience and mourns the death and suffering of people and other living things. His is a poetry of compassion, emotionally evocative and serious, but also laced with humor. While the first-person pronoun is predominant, his poetry treats the poet's observations of both the world and himself in such a way that his persona is not limited to strictly personal revelation. Jane Somerville (1990) maintains that Stern "creates the effect of dramatic presence" and that his "speakerhero is a tragi-comic character."
