Page:Modern Russian Poetry.djvu/24

xviii One of their number has recently declared that a poem must be not an organized entity, but rather a succession of such self-sufficient images, moving as in dreams.

A sensational career awaited the other post-symbolist development, futurism. It originated with the cubo-futurists in Moscow in 1911 and a year later the Petrograd ego-futurists issued their manifesto. The difference between them was rather like that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the one hitting everything it could see—when it got really excited, the other hitting everything within reach, whether it could see it or not. They hit out less to épater le bourgeois than professedly to discard all the canons of art and to destroy toothless Ratio. Their proclaimed desire was to raze the past and build the present on nothing. Their poetics provide for a language consisting of elements having an audible and a visual, but no intellectual value. This is merely an ideal which, luckily for the rest of us, their poetry does not always achieve.

"Let us gorge ourselves with the void," says one of them. The poetic gift can thrive even on this futile diet. Through their cacophony is sometimes heard the shrill and raucous voice of a machine-made age, their distorted language occasionally mirrors a time which is out of joint, and their violently eccentric imagery wrests new meanings from old commonplaces, as in Mayakovsky's line: "A bald lantern voluptuously takes off the blue stocking from the street." Naturally, they resist translation, except in the case of Severyanin, the early leader of the Petrograd group, whose work is, however, not typical.