Page:Modern Russian Poetry.djvu/23

Rh of all poetry. Substance is what these sophisticated lyricists are seeking. And so we find them turning to the imperishable gods of Hellas, wandering down exotic vistas, exploring with Gorodetzky the native folklore, embracing with Kuzmin the delights of stylization. A doctrinaire fury rides all these poets. They are inveterate preface-writers, and, what is worse, do not leave their prefaces entirely out of their art, forgetting that philosophy, in Symons' words, is the dung which lies at the roots of poetry.

Shortly before the war the symbolist impetus was felt to have spent itself. There was a general dissatisfaction with the spirit which informed it. The poets, says a Russian critic, were tired of plumbing the ultimate depths of the soul, and of daily ascending the Golgotha of mysticism. After the ecstasies came the desire for the ice-water of simplicity. No longer expressing mystery in music, the poets sought the limited, precise, concrete image. This movement manifested itself in the Acmeist secession. Grouped around a publishing firm, known as the Guild of Poets, which has this year been revived, the Acmeists or Adamists, led by Gumilev, Akhmatova and Gorodetzky, attacked symbolism, to celebrate raw reality. Proclaiming the primitive vision of a Gauguin, they insisted on immediate contact with the tangible, visible, audible world. The coterie did not write much more than its manifesto, though its method may be discovered in the work of the later "imazhinist" (imagist) group, of which Yesenin and Marienhof are representative members. These build their poetics upon the concept of the autonomous image, regarded as the end of all poetry.