SOURCE: Bloom, Harold. “Dark and Radiant Peripheries: Mark Strand and A. R. Ammons.” Southern Review n.s. 8, no. 1 (January 1972): 133-49.

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's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his magnetisms. We go to Herodotus and Plutarch for examples of Fate; but we are examples. …

—Emerson, Fate

I

The four books of new American poetry that have moved me most in the last two years are Uplands and Briefings by A. R. Ammons and Reasons for Moving and Darker by Mark Strand. Ammons was born in North Carolina in 1926; Strand, in Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1934. Born equidistant between them in time and space, I discover that reading their recent books has defined the limits of my...