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    A Study Guide for Gerald Stern's "One of the Smallest"
    A Study Guide for Gerald Stern's "One of the Smallest"
    A Study Guide for Gerald Stern's "One of the Smallest"
    Ebook32 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Gerald Stern's "One of the Smallest"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Gerald Stern's "One of the Smallest," 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 dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535830263
    A Study Guide for Gerald Stern's "One of the Smallest"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Gerald Stern's "One of the Smallest" - Gale

      1

      One of the Smallest

      Gerald Stern

      1997

      Introduction

      Gerald Stern's poem One of the Smallest was first published in the journal Poetry in January 1997. A four-page poem, it is the first section of six sections in Stern's twelfth book of poetry, Last Blue, published in 2000. Stern did not start publishing poetry until 1971, when he was forty-six years old, but by 1973, he had received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to be a master poet for Pennsylvania, and he received numerous awards afterward, including the National Book Award in 1998 for his collection of poetry entitled This Time: New and Selected Poems. Last Blue was also well received as a continuation of Stern's emotional, exuberant expression of himself in surreal images. Using the first person, the narrator becomes a sort of Everyman based on Stern's own background and memories. One of the Smallest is typical of Stern's work in that it includes abundant imagery taken from elements of the natural world such as animals, plants, and a river. A poem about death and rebirth, One of the Smallest follows a ray of sunshine through multiple locations and transformations as a life force that is compared to and connected with a person's life span.

      Author Biography

      Born on February 22, 1925, Gerald Stern grew up in a rough neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents, both Eastern European immigrants, were Orthodox Jews who sent him to a religious school, but he stopped practicing his faith shortly after his bar mitzvah. In childhood, Stern suffered from anti-Semitism; moreover, at age eight, he experienced the traumatic death of his nine-year-old sister Sylvia to spinal meningitis. In 1947, he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, and then earned his master's degree from Columbia University in 1949. Although

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