SOURCE: Hamilton, Craig A. “Strand's ‘The History of Poetry.’” Explicator 60, no. 3 (spring 2002): 177-79.

In the following essay, Hamilton offers a brief analysis of the formal features of Strand's poem “The History of Poetry.”

Of Mark Strand's poems since 1990, “The History of Poetry” (Continuous [The Continuous Life] 56) is representative both formally and thematically of his more recent work. Strand used short stanza forms for many of his poems from the 1960s to the 1980s, but his more recent poems are somewhat longer, normally consisting of one stanza. “The Great Poet Returns” (Blizzard [Blizzard of One] 12), an example that readers of the New Yorker magazine would have seen on 20 November 1995, is one clear instance of a formal shift away from the shorter forms of Strand's past. This shift from short to long no doubt culminated in Dark Harbor (1993), a long poem in forty-five parts, written mainly in tercets. However, to...