A heroic era has begun in the life of the word. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering. People are hungry. Still hungrier is the state. But there is something even hungrier: time. Time wants to devour the state. Like a trumpet-voice sounds the threat scratched by Derzhavin on his slate board.6 Whoever will raise high the word and show it to time, as the priest does the Eucharist, will be a second Joshua, son of Nun. There is nothing hungrier than the contemporary state, and a hungry state is more terrible than a hungry man. To show compassion for the state which denies the word is the contemporary poet’s civic “way,” the heroic feat that awaits him.
Let us praise the fateful burden
Which the people’s leader tearfully bears.
Let us praise the twilight burden of power,
Its intolerable weight.
Whoever has a heart, he must hear, O time,
How your boat goes to the bottom . . .7
One shouldn’t demand of poetry any special quiddity, concreteness, materiality. It’s that very same revolutionary hunger. The doubt of Thomas. Why should one have to touch it with the fingers? But the main point is, why should the word be identified with the thing, with the grass, with the object that it signifies?
Is the thing master of the word? The word is a Psyche. The living word does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, this or that objective significance, materiality, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers freely, like a soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten.
What’s been said of materiality sounds somewhat different applied to imagery: “Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou!”8
Write imageless poems if you can, if you know how. A blind man will recognize a beloved face by just barely having touched it with his seeing fingers; and tears of joy, the authentic joy of recognition, will spurt from his eyes after a long separation. The poem is alive through an inner image, that resounding mold of form, which anticipates the written poem. Not a single word has appeared, but the poem already resounds. What resounds is the inner image; what touches it is the poet’s aural sense.
“And the flash of recognition alone is sweet to us!”9
These days, something like glossolalia manifests itself. In sacred frenzy, poets speak in the language of all times, all cultures. Nothing is impossible. Just as a room where a man is dying is opened to all, so the door of the old world is flung wide before the crowd. Suddenly everything has become common property. Come in and help yourself. Everything’s available: all the labyrinths, all the hiding places, all the forbidden paths. The word has become, not a seven-stop, but a thousand-stop reed, instantly animated by the breathing of all the ages. In glossolalia the most striking thing is that the speaker does not know the language in which he speaks. He speaks in a totally obscure tongue. And to everyone, and to him, too, it seems he’s talking Greek or Babylonian. It is something quite the reverse of erudition. Contemporary poetry, for all its complexity and its inner violence, is naïve: “Ecoutez la chanson grise . . .”10
A synthetic poet of modern life would seem to me to be not a Verhaeren, but a kind of Verlaine of culture. For him the whole complexity of the old world would be like that same old Pushkinian reed. In him, ideas, scientific systems, political theories would sing, just as nightingales and roses used to sing in his predecessors. They say the cause of revolution is hunger in the interplanetary spaces. One has to sow wheat in the ether.
Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution.
Note
Note: This translation was originally published in Arion 2, no. 4 (1976).
Attack
I.
What poetry needs is Classicism, what poetry needs is Hellenism, what poetry needs is a heightened sense of imagery, the rhythm of the machine, urban collectivism, peasant folklore . . . Poor poetry! Under the muzzle of these unmitigated demands now being leveled at her, she shies. What should poetry be like? Well, maybe poetry shouldn’t be like anything, maybe poetry doesn’t owe anybody anything, and maybe these creditors of hers are all fraudulent! Nothing comes easier than talk about what art needs: first of all, it’s always arbitrary and commits nobody to anything; second, it provides an inexhaustible theme for philosophizing; third, it relieves people of a rather unpleasant obligation that not everybody is up to—gratitude for what is. It relieves them from the most commonplace gratitude for what a given time has to offer as poetry.
O monstrous ingratitude: to Kuzmin, to Mayakovsky, to Khlebnikov, Aseev, Viacheslav Ivanov, Sologub, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Gumilev, Khodasevich1—quite different as they are, made of different clay. They aren’t, after all, simply the Russian poets of yesterday or today; they are for all time. God wasn’t humiliating us when he gave us the likes of these. A people does not choose its poets, just as no one ever chooses his own parents. A people that does not know how to honor its poets deserves . . . Well, it deserves nothing. You might just say it is irrelevant. Yet what a difference between the pure ignorance of the people and the half-knowledge of the ignorant fop. The Hottentots, to test their old men, would make them climb a tree. Then they would shake the tree: if the old man had grown so weak he fell out of the tree, that meant he had to be killed. The snob imitates the Hottentots; his favored method recalls the ritual I have just described. To this, I think the proper response is contempt. We must distinguish between those who are interested in poetry and those who are interested in a Hottentot amusement.
Nothing favors the contagion of snobbery more than frequent change in the generations of poets, given one and the same generation of readers. The reader gets used to feeling himself an observer in the parterre. Before him file the changing schools. He frowns, grimaces, acts capriciously. Finally, he begins to feel an altogether unfounded sense of his own superiority—of the constant before the ephemeral, of the immobile before the mobile. The rapid change of poetic schools in Russia has sent one and the same reader reeling.
The reading generation of the nineties turned out to be insubstantial, utterly incompetent in poetry. For this reason, the Symbolists long awaited their readers and, by strength of circumstances, by their intellect, their education and maturity, seemed much older than the callow youth to whom they turned. The first decade of the twentieth century, judging by the decadence of public taste, was not much higher than the nineties, and along with The Scales,2 that militant citadel of the new school, we had the illiterate tradition of the “Wild Rose” group [Shipovniki], the monstrous almanac literature, with its coarse and ignorant pretentiousness.
As individual and highly polished poems appeared out of the great womb of Symbolism, as the tribe disintegrated and a kingdom of the poetic person ensued, the reader who’d been educated on tribal poetry of the Symbolist sort—that womb of all new Russian poetry—grew distraught in a world of blossoming diversity where everything would no longer fit under the tribal hat, where every person stood bareheaded and apart. After this tribal period, which infused new blood and proclaimed an exceptionally capacious canon, after a dense medley that triumphed in the rich, deep bell-ringing of Viacheslav Ivanov, came the time of the person, of personality. Yet all of contemporary Russian poetry came out of the tribal Symbolist womb. The reader has a short memory, and is unwilling to acknowledge this. O acorns, acorns! who needs an oak when we have acorns.3