Gerald Stern, one of the country’s most loved and respected poets who wrote with spirited melancholy and earthly humor about his childhood, Judaism, mortality and the wonders of the contemplative life, has died. He was 97.
Stern, New Jersey’s first poet laureate, died Thursday at Calvary Hospice in New York City, according to his longtime partner, Anne Marie Macari. A statement from Macari, released Saturday by publisher WW Norton, didn’t include the cause of death.
A lifelong agnostic who also fiercely believed in “the idea of the Jew,” the poet wrote more than a dozen books and described himself as “part comedic, part idealistic, colored in irony, smeared with mockery and sarcasm.” In poems and essays, he wrote with special intensity about the past — his immigrant parents, long-lost friends and lovers, and the striking divisions between rich and poor and Jews and non-Jews in Pittsburgh.
Stern lived in Europe and New York during the 1950s and eventually settled in a 19th century home near the Delaware River in Lambertville. His creative development came slowly. Only during free moments in the Army, in which he served for a brief time after World War II, did he conceive the “sweet idea” of writing for a living. He spent much of his 30s working on a poem about the American presidency, “The Pineys,” but despaired that it was “indulgent” and “tedious.