#eeposting

“What would American poets and critics do without the Central Europeans and the Russians to browbeat themselves with?” Maureen McLane asks in a recent review in the Chicago Tribune. “Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski, Zbigniew Herbert, Joseph Brodsky—here we have world-historical seriousness! Weight! Importance! Even their playfulness is weighty, metaphysical, unlike barbaric American noodlings!” McLane takes aim at a critical commonplace now well entrenched among anglophone poets and critics. In anthologies, essays, and poems alike, the great Eastern Europeans of the century just past—Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Brodsky, Miłosz, Herbert, Szymborska, et al.—play the acknowledged, if unofficial, legislators to their unhappily marginalized, conspicuously unoppressed neighbors to the west. “Only here do they really respect poetry—they kill because of it,” Osip Mandelstam remarked to his wife at the onset of Stalin’s Great Terror. “More people die for poetry here than anywhere else.” There are advantages, needless to say, to coming from nations where poets are less highly rated. But to writers reared on the Romantic myth of the poet-Christ, the fate of Eastern Europe’s modern bards, besieged by history, persecuted by one repressive regime after another, must seem seductive indeed. Few writers have ever died of benign neglect.