Poetry for Students, Volume 29

southern Iraq. Their poetic intensity, coming from their high pitch, enhances the dramatic sense in the poem by counterpointing ...

Chin, Marilyn, ‘‘How I Got That Name,’’ inThe Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty, Milkweed, 1994, pp. 16–18. Cortright, David, ‘‘A ...

An Attempt at Jealousy ‘‘An Attempt at Jealousy,’’ by Marina Tsvetaeva (sometimes spelled Tsvetayeva or Cvetaeva), is a poem abo ...

a father who was a professor of art history at Moscow University. Though well off as a child and adolescent, Tsvetaeva felt alie ...

plaster now? (God was hewn from stone, but he is smashed to bits.) How do you live with one of a thousand women after Lilith? 40 ...

stanza 6 contains a reference to Sinai, which no doubt means Mount Sinai, the place where Moses encounters God in the Bible. The ...

magic, in most of the translations as associated with the speaker, which again draws a contrast with the supposedly more ordinar ...

walking on Mount Sinai with a divinity or being in the presence of royalty; it was like living with the finest marble instead of ...

divine experience; Carrara marble suggests a grand work of art, contrasting with cheap plas- ter; and references to the marketpl ...

Bolshevik Rule Tsvetaeva did not participate in any political or literary movements, but she did use the freedom provided by the ...

her son would be exposed to danger in the army; he did in fact die in the war. Prerevolutionary Nostalgia Tsvetaeva was not a po ...

CRITICISM Sheldon Goldfarb Goldfarb has a PhD in English, specializing in the literature of Victorian England. In this essay, he ...

to be jealous, in other words. But since the speaker is in fact clearly jealous, what she is doing is pretending to pretend. It ...

something similar in their temperaments. What that similarity was may have been a desire to find a paradise in some time other t ...

necessity an act of interpretation, and by its nature Cvetaeva’s verse tends to defy any single interpretation. Naydan’s solutio ...

Vremia; ty menia obmanesh’!), mar the volume unnecessarily. The Afterword concludes with an excellent discussion of the publicat ...

Babii Yar Yevgeny Yevtushenko composed ‘‘Babii Yar’’ in September 1961. The first public reading of the poem took place at Oktob ...

Yevtushenko made the changes, as requested; after the fall of Communism, the original text was reinserted in performances outsid ...

critical of the Soviet government throughout his career, he was honored by that government many times. As of 2008, Yevtushenko l ...

describing a sheer cliff hanging over a ravine that became a mass grave. This site creates fear, which can be understood in two ...