Word: pasternaks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Whatever its shortcomings, Poems is a significant literary event. Culled mainly from seven slim volumes of his verse produced between 1916 and 1945, this is the first comprehensive collection of Pasternak's poetry ever to appear in English...
Primacy of the Image. The volume suggests why critics rank him with such movers and shapers of modern verse as Rilke, Valéry, Eliot and Yeats. There is a family resemblance linking Pasternak to these Western poets, but it is that of a distant cousin, not a brother. An occasional image carries the haunting echo of kinship. For example, one poem of Pasternak's begins...
Eliot's memorable "when the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherised upon a table." But such instances of point-to-point similarity are rare. A Westerner can perhaps best understand Boris Pasternak's revolutionary impact on Russian verse within the historic Russian context...
...Creative Act. Pasternak was influenced by an esthetic movement in Russian poetry that rebelled against the didactic, social-protest verse of the late 19th century. He was briefly drawn to the "Futurists." with their sprung rhythms and staccato, telegraphic style. But in many ways he also harks back to the English romantics. With them-Blake, Shelley, Keats-Pasternak sees nature as the handwriting on God's wall, or at least as the outward sign of an unseen and perhaps mystical order of things. And with the romantics, Boris Pasternak shares the belief that the creative imagination is itself divine...
...Pasternak's subject here is Pushkin's composition of a poem called The Prophet. A further subject is the creative act itself, including Pasternak's writing of his poem. This corresponds to his belief that "the world's best creations describe their own birth.'' The birth of the poem, Pasternak seems to be saying, is like the birth of a world, day emerging from night. The poet encompasses the world and suffers to express it ("Blood froze in the huge Colossus") while the common run of humanity sleeps under the snows. Such is Pasternak...