Painters That Inspired Late Poet Laureate Mark Strand

The death of beloved poet Mark Strand on Nov. 29 was an immense loss to the literary community. Through an extensive teaching career, most recently as an English professor at Columbia University, and accolades including being named U.S. poet laureate in 1990 and winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1999, Strand spurred imaginations with poems marked by a soft frankness, surrealism and a deep respect for the visual arts.

The New York Times obituary of the poet cited painters Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte and Edward Hopper among Strand's influences. Strand authored reflective commentaries on the works of Hopper and his own contemporary William H. Bailey.

Marilyn Reizbaum, Harrison King McCann Professor of English at Bowdoin College, has taught Strand's book "Hopper" and studied the ways the poet incorporated his love of the visual arts into his work -- uniting the two disciplines as easily as if they were chatting with each other.

“Strand has been an important voice for the happy exchange between media such as visual and written art,” Reizbaum said.

Strand himself was a visual artist, and considered it as a career path before switching his focus to poetry, according to the Paris Review. In 2013, the New Yorker interviewed Strand about an exhibit at the Lori Bookstein gallery in New York of his own collages, made with paper he colored himself.

The painterly qualities of Edward Hopper’s work -- “its shapes, its lines, its images and a sense of meaning and emotion" -- are also qualities of Strand’s poetry (and all poetry)," Reizbaum said.

Here's a taste of the painters that inspired Mark Strand:

William H. Bailey