SOURCE: Miklitsch, Robert. “Beginnings and Endings: Mark Strand's ‘The Untelling.’” Literary Review 21, no. 3 (spring 1978): 357-73.

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.

Whatever we have words for,                     that we have already got beyond. 

—Nietzsche

Mark Strand is an outstanding poet. He stands out because, falling as he does between that generation of major American poets alive today (Ammons, Ashbery, Howard, Kinnell, Merrill, Merwin, Rich, Wright) and the younger poets who are just now gaining public recognition (Gluck, Hass, and Simic, to name three), he is both a transitional figure and a representative one. He is representative in his poetic influences (Stevens, Roethke and Bishop) and his translation of Latin American poets like Alberti; yet his first four books set him apart from the previous...