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    A Study Guide for Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole"
    A Study Guide for Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole"
    A Study Guide for Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole"
    Ebook39 pages27 minutes

    A Study Guide for Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781410393869
    A Study Guide for Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole" - Gale

      18

      Keeping Things Whole

      Mark Strand

      1964

      Introduction

      Keeping Things Whole originally appeared in Mark Strand's first collection, Sleeping with One Eye Open. The book was published in 1964 by Stone Wall Press, a small independent press in Iowa City, Iowa, where Strand was attending the famous Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. It was a very limited edition, with only 250 copies printed, and it was not until his Selected Poems was published in 1980 that the poem became widely available.

      It has become one of Strand's most widely anthologized poems, and it is so representative of his life's work that it was printed in many of his obituaries when he died in 2014. The poem exemplifies many of the themes of his later work. It references the painterly notions of the figure, that is, the focal object in a painting, often a person, and the ground, or background against which that figure is painted. This became a motif throughout Strand's work, one that grew out of his early training as a painter and from his lifelong interest in the work of artists like Edward Hopper. The poem's stark setting is representative of an existential bent that runs through much of Strand's work, a thread critics have called variously dark or bleak or obsessed with death. In a 1991 interview with Bill Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, Strand reacted to this notion with his characteristic dry humor: ‘Oh, I wouldn't call them especially dark,’ Strand says. ‘I find them evenly lit.’

      Author Biography

      Strand was born on April 11, 1934, in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Because his father worked for Pepsi-Cola, the family moved often, and he lived in locales as diverse as Cleveland, Montreal, New York, and Philadelphia as well as foreign countries, including Colombia, Peru, and Mexico.

      Strand completed a bachelor's degree at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1957 and then enrolled in the Yale School of Art and Architecture in order to study with the painter Josef Albers. He completed a second bachelor's degree at Yale, in painting, a discipline he left soon afterward, as it was at Yale where he discovered his vocation as a poet. After Yale, Strand spent a year in Florence, Italy, where he had a Fulbright

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