Word: pasternaks
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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...
Message of a Spirit. Much of Pasternak is less complicated. He is often drawn to the simple joys of daily existence...
...Doctor Zhivago has already shown, the sense of life in Pasternak is heightened by the flashing vigor of his imagery; sometimes he welds disparate images to startle the reader into a rebirth of wonder. At the first patter of a summer drizzle, "dust swallowed up the pills of raindrops." In an offshore storm, "skies crouch lower/ Flying downward/ Steep/ Sea slopes/ And finger the deep/ With wings of clamorous gulls...