Public Libraries of Suffolk County, New York

Lyric poetry and modern politics, Russia, Poland, and the West, Clare Cavanagh

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-315) and index

index present

non fiction

Lyric poetry and modern politics

bibliography

Clare Cavanagh

Russia, Poland, and the West

Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics explores the intersection of poetry, national life, and national identity in Poland and Russia from 1917 to the present. As a corrective to recent trends in criticism, acclaimed translator and critic Clare Cavanagh demonstrates how the practice of the personal lyric in totalitarian states such as Russia and Poland did not represent an escapist tendency; rather it reverberated as a bold political statement and at times a dangerous act. Cavanagh also provides a comparative study of modern poetry from the perspective of the eastern and western sides of the iron curtain. Among the poets discussed are Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Yeats, Whitman, Frost, Szymborska, Zagajewski, and Miłosz; close readings of individual poems are included, some translated for the first time. Cavanagh examines these poets and their work as a challenge to Western postmodernist theories, thus offering new perspectives on twentieth-century lyric poetry

Introduction: acknowledged legislation -- Courting disaster: Blok and yeats -- Whitman, Mayakovsky, and the body politic -- The death of the book a la russe: the Acmeists under Stalin -- Akhmatova and the forms of responsibility: the Poem without a Hero -- Avant-guarde again, or the posthumous Polish adventures of Vladimir Mayakovsky -- Bringing up the rear: the histories of Wislawa Szymborska -- Counterrevolution in poetic language: Poland's Generation of '68 -- The unacknowledged legislator's dream: Czeslaw Milosz and Anglo-American poetry -- Afterword: martyrs, survivors, and success stories, or the postcommunist prophet