SOURCE: "Gerald Stern Among the Poets: The Speaker as Meaning," in American Poetry Review, Vol. 17, No. 6, November/December, 1988, pp. 11-19.

In the essay below, Somerville offers an overview of Stern's poetry, analyzing the variety of roles Stern assumes as narrator of his poems.

The poetry of Gerald Stern is defined and governed by its flamboyant speaker, a stagey hero whose life story is the poet's, but enlarged and mythicized. This eloquent spokesman holds the line between the unconditional authority of narration and the contingency of character; in these we recognize the two positions we constantly hold as speakers and actors. He is onstage throughout the entire canon and constantly demands our attention. He does not react passively to events; he wrestles with them and shapes, even invents, the world he moves in. He transforms himself endlessly, playing whatever parts appeal to him, yet his identity never changes: whether...