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Reviewed by:
  • Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West by Clare Cavanagh
  • Nina Pelikan Straus
Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 344 pp.

With Miłosz’s The Captive Mind standing behind Cavanagh’s Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics, which has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, there is a chance that Western critics’ interpretations of modern Russian and Polish lyric will at last undergo a correction and refinement. Cavanagh engages in a polemic with postmodern theory while providing a comparative study of lyric poetry on both sides of the Iron Curtain: the revision of Anglo-American Romanticism by Miłosz, Blok’s echoing of Yeats, Whitman’s influence on Mayakovsky and Akhmatova’s on Szymborska, the haunting of Eliot and Akhmatova by the “ghost of the past,” and the assimilation of Tel Quel by Zagajewski’s generation. Miłosz is the “unacknowledged legislator” of this tradition of cross-fertilizations—of lyrics that salvage “lost and overlooked things” from political catastrophe and war. Even as Cavanagh focuses deftly on the details of particular poems, she treats “the blind eye” that critics like Said have turned on the historical experience of Eastern Europe. While communist European states followed their version of Marx, demanding that lyric poets transcend “bourgeois interiorization,” Marxist critics in the West praised the “anti-imperialist” poetry of collective validation, though at the same time damning the communist state. As a consequence, Western criticism simplified the status of Eastern European poets to that of martyrs—a simplification that Cavanagh resists and complicates.

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