Acmeism: The Reality Of Poetry Essay, Research Paper

Acmeism

The Reality of Poetry

Russian poetry during between the years 1912 and 1925 is referred to as Acmeism. The word Acmeism comes from the Greek word ?akme? meaning ?point?, ?tip?, ?summit?, or ?flower?. The ?acmeist school? grew out of the Guild of Poets, a workshop founded in November 1911 by Nikolai Gumilev. As with all ages, there are positives and negatives to Acmeism. On the positive side of the acmeist aesthetic, there stood a demand for clarity and discernible logos in poetry as against the frequent vagueness of Symbolism. On the negative side, Acmeism insisted on seeing things directly as what they appear, not through a haze of symbolic connotations. For example, Osip Mandelstam, one of the three legendary Russian poets who grew out of the school of Acmeism said,

Let us take for example a rose and the sun, a dove and a maiden. To a symbolist, none of these images is of any interest in itself, and the rose is a symbol of the sun, the sun a symbol of the rose, the dove a symbol of the maiden, the maiden a symbol of the dove. Images are disemboweled like stuffed animals and filled with a foreign content. Instead of a ?forest of symbols?, a taxidermist?s shop.

What Mandelstam is trying to say here is that the acmeist movement is an offshoot of the symbolist movement, but instead of following the traditional relation between ?word? and ?meaning?, acmeists? reverse the relation. Acmeists let the ?word? generate ?meaning? rather than let the ?meaning? generate the ?word?. By following this format, it leads to giving tropes a life of their own, ?realizing? metaphors. The other two poets, besides Mendalstam, who made a huge impact on Acmeism are Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatov. Mendalstam, Gumilev and Akhmatov combined to make the post-symbolist modernism movement a time when Russian poets were forced to their death or in to exile by the government for writing about wars and revolutions the way reality depicted them.

Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev was born April 15th, 1886 in Kronstadt. Gumilev became a poet early in his life by first publishing, Road of the Conquistadors while he was still in school. By 1908, Gumilev was a well-established poet getting favorable reviews from poets like as Valery Bryusov and fellow acmeist Anna Akhmatov. Gumilev?s poetry created an objective and visual effect and has a Parnassian quality (French school of poets emphasizing form over emotion) likening him to Leconte de Lisle. In 1911 Gumilev organized his Guild of Poets workshop, which engendered a new school of poets who called themselves Acmeists or Adamists.

When the War broke out Gumilev immediately volunteered for active duty. Being on the front-line and getting decorated twice enabled Gumilev to express the reality of the bloodshed that took place. In 1916 Gumilev had his War poems published in a collection called The Quiver. This is where Gumilev reached the peak of his powers. These poems are solemn expressions of a strange faith in the righteousness of the Russian effort. In his poem called War (1915), Gumilev is very realistic and morally uplifting. It expresses his belief that the war?s dangers are conducive to spiritual growth and Christian piety. In War, the fourth verse demonstrates the characteristics of spiritual growth and Christian piety: “Lord, give Thy blessings, / To the laborers who slowly walk, / In the fields watered by blood, / Sowing heroic feats, harvesting glory.” The Christian piety comes in effect when he writes his first line of the fourth verse, asking the Lord to give his blessing to the soldiers who walk through a field not knowing what will happen next. The verse becomes morally uplifting when Gumilev talks about the unrelated, valiant efforts of soldiers resulting in triumph. This poem is a good example of real devoted spirit toward the Russian effort during the war.

On August 3rd, 1921 Gumilev was arrested and shot by a firing squad of the Cheka for allegedly taking part in a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. This was the harsh reality of the time. No one, not even a Russian intellectual who put his life on front-line was allowed to have a different opinion on the government (only had suspicion that he was guilty of being a monarchist conspirator).

Anna Andreevna Gorenko Akhmatov was born in 1889 in Odessa, but spent most of her life in or near St. Petersburg. She developed an intimate poetic relationship with the city of St. Petersburg devoting many of her poems to the beautiful city. She married Nikolai Gumilev in 1910 only to get a divorce from him by 1918. The marriage was not a successful one because of jealously. Gumilev never obtained the immediate success as a poet like his wife did with such collections Evening (1912), Rosary (1914, and The White Flock (1917).

Akhmatov was an acmeist from beginning to end, in the sense that she never abandoned the firm ground of a palpable reality, showed a lifelong concern for the word, and at all times maintained a connection with the values and myths of Western civilization. She depicts her stern manner in her war time poems that are in the collection, The White Flock. In some of these war poems, she speaks of the loss of a man through war, a husband, a lover, or a son. In The White Flock she draws up stark contrasts between peacetime and wartime by talking about the unsuspecting prewar years in St. Petersburg, to telling about the loss of a significant person in her life on the battlefield. The White Flock introduces the war and with it entirely new emotions: worry, desolation, and finally despair over Russia?s fate. The war awakened Akhmatov?s feeling of belonging to her country, the land, its people, and also her religious feelings. Like Gumilev, Akhmatov too expressed her religious feelings and wrote with pride about her own country. Her patriotic feelings were far removed from the strident jingoism of some of her peers for she kept in touch with reality. In one of her poems entitled, July 1914, Akmatov starts off the poem with the austere reality that war is an awful place to be: “It smells of scorched earth. For four weeks, / Dry peat is burning on the moors. / Even the birds did not sing today, / And the aspens quiver no more.” In this first verse, one can see that Akmatov tries get the reader to be surrounded by three of the five senses, smell, sight, and sound. This is so the reader gets a true picture of what it?s like to wake-up from a deep sleep and find yourself on a foggy, desolate battlefield. What is also intriguing about Akmatov?s writings is that she uses the color ?white? a lot. It dominates the imagery of this collection, occurring many times directly and in images of snow, ice, swans, daylight, etc. Even death is perceived as white. In the last verse Akmatov demonstrates this imagery and whiteness: “But the enemy will not cut up, / Our land at his evil pleasure: / The Virgin Herself will spread a White / Sheet over our great sorrows.” In this last verse, one sees the imagery of the land and how a person?s great anguishes from the war will be hidden by the ?Virgin Herself? by spreading a white sheet over them.

Due to Stalin and an constant changes in the government, Akmatov was seldom able to publish after 1921. She was singled out as a target of the regime?s dissatisfaction in an address by Stalin?s culture tsar Andrei Zhdanov, and for this, expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. Even after Stalin?s death, Akmatov still had trouble publishing her poems. The poetry of the years 1926 to 1964 came out after her death which was in 1966.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born January 15th, 1891 in Warsaw, but soon moved to St. Petersburg which is the city that invigorated his poetic style. Mandelstam was Jewish, though one would never know it from his writing since he eventually embraced Christianity, when he realized that Western culture (which he loved deeply) could not be separated from Christianity.

Mandelstam?s poetic career began with writing for the Guild of Poets, which was run by Gumilev. He had few close friends outside the circle of the Guild, but his talent was widely respected by his peers such as symbolists like Blok, and Voloshin. Many of Mandelstam?s poems deal with the death of the old world, to which the poet felt he belonged. Mandelstam?s poetic reaction to the Revolution geared many to turn their heads and think about what had happened. In May 1918, he saw the Revolution as a twilight of freedom which he actually entitled the poem he wrote for the Revolution. Twilight of Freedom appeared in Znamya truda (Banner of Labor) on May 23rd,1918. The journal represented the left wing of the Social Revolutionaries (SR?s). The poem had a subtitle, A Hymn (gimn), which explained that the poem must be read in a context of the cosmic moods in vogue during the first years of the Soviet regime, when the Revolution was often perceived like it was an event of vast ranges. The Revolution spread far and wide and hit small towns while also engulfing large cities like St. Petersburg. In this poem, Twilight of Freedom, his meaning is veiled; he pictures citizens as they strive to rule an all but sinking ship of state, harnessing swallows that obscure the sun. Mendalstam uses all the same acmeist qualities which Gumilev and Akmatov incorporated. Mendalstam has clashes with day and night, water and air, heaven and earth, hope and despair throughout his poems. He perceived the Revolution aesthetically, rather than politically which is interesting. Some believe that Mendalstam wanted the Revolution, but there are also some who believe that Mendalstam wanted to return to the old Russia where he felt that he belonged for it was more liberal than the Russia that he was now living in. The Stalinistic Russia that Mendalstam was forced to live in eventually killed him. During the 1920?s, he turned to autobiographical writing because he had difficulty publishing his poetry. In 1934 he was exiled for having written an anti-Stalin epigram, which was circulated in manuscript. By 1935, Mendalstam was living in great poverty and had no legal means of support. He was arrested on May 1st,1938 and died in a distant prison camp in December of that year.

These three legendary acmeist poets had much in common with each other: They all took as the cornerstone of their poetry the simple depiction of reality, without any other worldly symbolism; they were all twentieth-century humanists; they praised virtues such as bravery, honor, and honesty. Lastly, they had no political program, but the government in Russia still insisted that these people were a threat to the country. Therefore, it made it difficult for these poets to write and publish their works, It became a job of life or death, or exile for these poor acmeist poets who, in the long run, choose death in order to do what they loved and believed: write poetry

cited:

Victor Terras. Poetry of the Silver Age, (Dresden: Dresden University Press 1998) p. 147.

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Evelyn Bristol. A History of Russian Poetry, (New York: Oxford University Press 1991) p. 208.

Terras. p. 150.

Terras. p. 160.

Bristol. p. 212.

Terras. p. 165.

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Renato Poggioli. The Poets of Russia, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1960) p. 230.

Terras. p. 167.

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Joseph Brodsky, trans. Jane Gary Harris. Modern Russian Poets on Poetry, (Ann Arbor: Ardis 1976) p. 43.

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