The Poet & the Tyrant

Osip Mandelstam: A Biography

By Ralph Dutli (Translated from German by Ben Fowkes)

When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had predicted, in Stalin’s Gulag. His books had been removed from libraries and bookshops. Only braver readers kept them, sometimes hidden in saucepans at their dachas. From 1958, supported by the CIA, émigré scholars collected what they could from Russian publications of the writings of banned Russian authors; the works were so in demand that students like myself copied them out by hand. Impressionable readers were stunned by the hypnotic musicality of Mandelstam’s early poems, by the penetrating appreciation of the disaster that unfolded – the ‘ship of time going to the bottom’ – during the First World War and the Russian Revolution, by the fine love poems and by the use of biology to elucidate his times.

For a student of Russian literature, Mandelstam is a godsend. Every poem has memorable lines that could be quoted in many imaginable situations. Some are frivolous – ‘Eternal is the taste of fresh whipped cream,/As is the smell of orange peel’ – and others gnomic: ‘Everything has been. Everything will be repeated/And only the moment of recognition is sweet.’ Mandelstam absorbed into his poetics a whole century of Russian lyrical poetry, including Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev, as well as Derzhavin, Batyushkov and Baratynsky, so that his poetry seems to be a conversation with the dead. The influence of classical Greek and Latin poets, German Romantics and French symbolists can be discerned too. Yet you also feel the presence of an acutely nervous, highly reactive personality, steeling itself to face forces that threaten him with destruction.

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The house that a poet’s passion built

BY LAWRENCE CHRISTON

Robinson Jeffers was among the most ruggedly Promethean of 20th century poets, but every dawdling personal pleasure he denied himself in his flinty gaze at “boiling stars,” soaring hawks and insufferable mankind seemed to find its way into Tor House and Hawk Tower, the Carmel family compound he finished in 1924 after five years of hauling granite boulders out of the sea — first as a stonemason’s apprentice, then alone with block and tackle.

Wrestling with 300-pound rocks distracted Jeffers from chafing self-doubt over a small body of poems that was competent but undistinguished and guilt over staying home with his wife and two young boys while his generation went off to fight in World War I. The house became the answer to his anguish.

Outwardly, Tor House — and its nearby Hawk Tower — appears the rough extension of Jeffers, with its stubborn, thickly cobbled walls of Santa Lucian rock on a seaside bluff. The poet saw himself not just at the continent’s edge but also at the brooding, turbulent edge of history and human limit. When he gazed at the Pacific, he didn’t see anything on the other side except oblivion.

But the spell the house and tower exert on visitors is completely unexpected. Jeffers had one great love in his life, his wife Una — a smart and spirited beauty in whom he met his match. For whatever these structures of stone answer about him, they are his ardent, monumental tribute to their life together.

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Writing Poetry and Inspiring Painters: Portraits of Anna Akhmatova

ELIZAVETA ERMAKOVA

Anna Akhmatova’s poems combine classical elegance and amazing passion associated with the drama of her own destiny. The poet began to create at a time when the very idea that a woman could be a poet was rather unusual.

All significant events of the 20th century became landmarks in the fate of Anna Akhmatova. She survived two world wars, the Russian Revolution and the Siege of Leningrad. What courage she needed when she was forbidden to publish, or when her son and third husband were in the forced labor camps! Certainly, Akhmatova became the voice of the people.

Anna Akhmatova’s genius did not fit into any framework. Her mysterious nature attracted many genius artists she met during her life. But Anna was very attentive to every image of her. She preferred to pose in profile both to artists and photographers. Let us show you the most famous examples of Akhmatova’s portraits!

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Triad

Robinson Jeffers

Science, that makes wheels turn, cities grow,
Moribund people live on, playthings increase,
But has fallen from hope to confusion at her own business
Of understanding the nature of things; new Russia,
That stood a moment at dreadful cost half free,
Beholding the open, all the glades of the world
On both sides of the trap, and resolutely
Walked into the trap that has Europe and America;
The poet, who wishes not to play games with words,
His affair being to awake dangerous images
And call the hawks; they all feed the future, they serve God,
Who is very beautiful, but hardly a friend of humanity.

Fragments from the Alfoxden Notebook

by WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I
there would he stand
In the still covert of some [lonesome?] rock,
Or gaze upon the moon until its light
Fell like a strain of music on his soul
And seemed to sink into his very heart.
II

Why is it we feel
So little for each other, but for this,
That we with nature have no sympathy,
Or with such things as have no power to hold
Articulate language?

And never for each other shall we feel
As we may feel, till we have sympathy
With nature in her forms inanimate,
With objects such as have no power to hold
Articulate language. In all forms of things
There is a mind
III

Of unknown modes of being which on earth,
Or in the heavens, or in the heavens and earth
Exist by mighty combinations, bound
Together by a link, and with a soul
Which makes all one.

To gaze
On that green hill and on those scattered trees
And feel a pleasant consciousness of life
In the impression of that loveliness
Until the sweet sensation called the mind
Into itself, by image from without
Unvisited, and all her reflex powers
Wrapped in a still dream [?of] forgetfulness.

I lived without the knowledge that I lived
Then by those beauteous forms brought back again
To lose myself again as if my life
Did ebb and flow with a strange mystery.

Woodrow Wilson

Robinson Jeffers

(FEBRUARY, 1924)
It said “Come home, here is an end, a goal,
Not the one raced for, is it not better indeed? Victory you know requires
Force to sustain victory, the burden is never lightened, but final defeat
Buys peace: you have praised peace, peace without victory.”
He said “It seems I am traveling no new way,
But leaving my great work unfinished how can I rest? I enjoyed a vision,
Endured betrayal, you must not ask me to endure final defeat,
Visionless men, blind hearts, blind mouths, live still.”

It said “Yet perhaps your vision was less great
Than some you scorned, it has not proved even so practicable; Lenin
Enters this pass with less reluctance. As to betrayals: there are so many
Betrayals, the Russians and the Germans know.”

He said “I knew I have enemies, I had not thought
To meet one at this brink: shall not the mocking voices die in the grave?”
It said “They shall. Soon there is silence.” “I dreamed this end,” he said, “when the prow
Of the long ship leaned against dawn, my people

Applauded me, and the world watched me. Again
I dreamed it at Versailles, the time I sent for the ship, and the obstinate foreheads
That shared with me the settlement of the world flinched at my threat and yielded.
That is all gone. … Do I remember this darkness?”

It said “No man forgets it but a moment.
The darkness before the mother, the depth of the return.” “I thought” he answered,
“That I was drawn out of this depth to establish the earth on peace. My labor
Dies with me, why was I drawn out of this depth?”

It said “Loyal to your highest, sensitive, brave,
Sanguine, some few ways wise, you and all men are drawn out of this depth
Only to be these things you are, as flowers for color, falcons for swiftness,
Mountains for mass and quiet. Each for its quality

Is drawn out of this depth. Your tragic quality
Required the huge delusion of some major purpose to produce it.
What, that the God of the stars needed your help?” He said
“This is my last
Worst pain, the bitter enlightenment that buys peace.”

Solomon and the Witch

William Butler Yeats

And thus declared the Arab lady:
“Last night where under the wild moon
On grassy mattress I had lain me,
     Within my arms great Solomon,
I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue
Not his, not mine.”
          And he that knew
All sounds by bird or angel sung
Answered: “A crested cockerel crew
Upon a blossoming apple bough
Three hundred years before the Fall,
And never crew again till now,
And would not now but that he thought,
Chance being at one with Choice at last,
All that the brigand apple brought
And this foul world were dead at last.
He that crowed out eternity
Thought to have crowed it in again.
A lover with a spider’s eye
Will found out some appropriate pain,
Aye, though all passion’s in the glance,
For every nerve: lover tests lover
With cruelties of Choice and Chance;
And when at last the murder’s over
Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,
For each an imagined image brings
And finds a real image there;
Yet the world ends when these two things,
Though several, are a single light,
When oil and wick are burned in one;
Therefore a blessed moon last night
Gave Sheba to her Solomon.”
“Yet the world stays”:
          “If that be so,
Your cockerel found us in the wrong
Although it thought it worth a crow.
Maybe an image is too strong
Or maybe is not strong enough”

“The night has fallen; not a sound
In the forbidden sacred grove,
Unless a petal hit the ground,
Nor any human sight within it
But the crushed grass where we have lain;
And the moon is wilder every minute.
Oh, Solomon! Let us try again.”

Open Canon: Amy Lowell

E.R. Zarevich

Amy Lowell (1874–1925), Time magazine cover,
2 March 1925. Source: Public Domain.

Posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926, Amy Lowell was a self-educated poet who favored Imagism and rejected “safe” choices.

You are ice and fire,

The touch of you burns my hands like snow.

You are cold and flame.

You are the crimson of amaryllis,

The silver of moon-touched magnolias.

When I am with you,

My heart is a frozen pond

Gleaming with agitated torches.

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) wrote this passionate poem, “Opal,” about the love of her life, actress Ada Dwyer Russell. Lowell wanted to dedicate her collections to her as well, but Dwyer, fearing the public exposure of their love affair, begged her not to. The only book Lowell was allowed to dedicate to her paramour was an analytical biography of the poet John Keats, published in 1925. This was considered a “safe” subject in Dwyer’s eyes, but Lowell, in her own lifetime, rarely showed much interest in anything deemed “safe.” 

What she was interested in was shaking her native America out of its stiff poetic rut, through her allegiance and advancement of Imagism, a movement that was considered shocking to mainstream audiences at the time. The poem above exhibits some of the key elements of Imagism, a branch of literary modernism: simple, straightforward language, unconventional presentation of verse, and meaningful images that the author deconstructs down to their essences. It was a direct opposition to the popular styles of Romantic and Victorian poetry, rejecting their rigid sets of rules surrounding rhyme, rhythm, and acceptable content (which tended to involve long narratives and broad, philosophical ideas). In Lowell’s work, a touch of homoeroticism added the personal flair that distinguished her in this particular subgenre. As she would be exulted as a poet, she herself exulted in women. Like her poetry, lesbianism was something Lowell was able to confidently incorporate into her identity against the oppression of the era she lived in. 

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Souillac: Le Sacrifice d’Abraham

R.S. Thomas

Thomas wrote “Souillac: Le Sacrifice d’Abraham” after visiting the 12th-century Romano-Byzantine style Sainte-Marie abbey church in the town of Souillac, in the Dordogne valley in the Upper Quercy, not far from Black Périgord.

Ego Dominus Tuus

William Butler Yeats

HIC
On the grey sand beside the shallow stream
Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still
A lamp burns on beside the open book
That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon
And though you have passed the best of life still trace
Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion
Magical shapes.

ILLE
By the help of an image
I call to my own opposite, summon all
That I have handled least, least looked upon.

HIC
And I would find myself and not an image.

ILLE
That is our modern hope and by its light
We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind
And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;
Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush
We are but critics, or but half create,
Timid, entangled, empty and abashed
Lacking the countenance of our friends.

HIC
And yet
The chief imagination of Christendom
Dante Alighieri so utterly found himself
That he has made that hollow face of his
More plain to the mind’s eye than any face
But that of Christ.

ILLE
And did he find himself,
Or was the hunger that had made it hollow
A hunger for the apple on the bough
Most out of reach? and is that spectral image
The man that Lapo and that Guido knew?
I think he fashioned from his opposite
An image that might have been a stony face,
Staring upon a bedouin’s horse-hair roof
From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned
Among the coarse grass and the camel dung.
He set his chisel to the hardest stone.
Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life,
Derided and deriding, driven out
To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,
He found the unpersuadable justice, he found
The most exalted lady loved by a man.

HIC
Yet surely there are men who have made their art
Out of no tragic war, lovers of life,
Impulsive men that look for happiness
And sing when they have found it.

ILLE
No, not sing,
For those that love the world serve it in action,
Grow rich, popular and full of influence,
And should they paint or write still it is action:
The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.
What portion in the world can the artist have
Who has awakened from the common dream
But dissipation and despair?

HIC
And yet
No one denies to Keats love of the world;
Remember his deliberate happiness.

ILLE
His art is happy but who knows his mind?
I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,
For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And made—being poor, ailing and ignorant,
Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
The coarse-bred son of a livery stable-keeper—
Luxuriant song.

HIC
Why should you leave the lamp
Burning alone beside an open book,
And trace these characters upon the sands;
A style is found by sedentary toil
And by the imitation of great masters.

ILLE
Because I seek an image, not a book.
Those men that in their writings are most wise
Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.
I call to the mysterious one who yet
Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream
And look most like me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things
The most unlike, being my anti-self,
And standing by these characters disclose
All that I seek; and whisper it as though
He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud
Their momentary cries before it is dawn,
Would carry it away to blasphemous men.

“Ego Dominus Tuus” was first published in Yeats’ 1917 book Per Amica Silentia Lunae.

The title is from Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova. It means “I am your Lord,” spoken to Dante in a dream by the characterization of love. Hic and Ille, Latin for this man and that man, discuss the ideas of romanticism and pragmatism.