This exploration of poetry and national life in Poland and Russia from 1917 to the present also offers a comparative study of the poetry of the Eastern and Western sides of the “iron curtain,” and an examination of these topics in light of Western postmodernist philosophical theories. 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 Milosz; 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.

Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West

Literature & Fiction

Cavanagh, Clare

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

A poet describes coming of age in Communist Poland while the Party is losing power and the opposition grows in strength.

Another Beauty

Biographies & Memoirs

Zagajewski, Adam

Arts & Literature

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an "apocalypse of cultural community," then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a "yearning for world culture," he defined the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose. Clare Cavanagh has written a sustained study placing Mandelstam's "remembrance and invention" of a usable poetic past in the context of modernist writing in general, with particular attention to the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.Cavanagh traces Mandelstam’s creation of tradition from his earliest lyrics to his last verses, written shortly before his arrest and subsequent death in a Stalinist camp. Her work shows how the poet, generalizing from his own dilemmas and disruptions, addressed his epoch’s paradoxical legacy of disinheritance--and how he responded to this unwelcome legacy with one of modernism’s most complex, ambitious, and challenging visions of tradition. Drawing on not only Russian and Western modernist writing and theory, but also modern European Jewish culture, Russian religious thought, postrevolutionary politics, and even silent film, Cavanagh traces Mandelstam’s recovery of a "world culture" vital, vast, and varied enough to satisfy the desires of the quintessential outcast modernist.

Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition

Princeton University Press

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

Goldsmith, Jack

Vendler, Helen

Pippin, Robert B.

McAuley, James

Mutongi, Kenda

Jenkins, Alan

Białoszewski, Miron

Shapira, Anita

West, Adrian Nathan

Rusinek, Michal

Forostyna, Oksana

Lorentzen, Christian

Jensen, Morton Hoi

Dersesiewicz, William

Ballan, Anna

Bialik, Chaim Nachman

Arts & Photography

Liberties Journal

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Books by Cavanagh, Clare