The River of Time: Time-Space, History, and Language in Avant-Garde, Modernist, and Contemporary Russian and Anglo-American Poetry(Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy)

This book explores the changing perception of time and space in avant-garde, modernist, and contemporary poetry. The author characterizes the works of modern Russian, French, and Anglo-American poets based on their attitudes towards reality, time, space, and history revealed in their poetics. The author compares the work of major Russian innovative poets Osip Mandelstam, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Joseph Brodsky with that of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and, in spite of the postmodernist "estrangement" of reality, the author proves that similar traces can be found in the work of contemporary American poets John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. Both affinities and drastic differences are revealed in the poets' attitudes towards time-space, reality, and history.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Forms of Time-Space (Chronotope) in Poetry Part One. Beyond Barriers: Avant-Gardе and Futurism 1. Forms of Chronotope in Avant-Garde Poetry 2. “The King of Time” and “The Slave of Time”: Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky Part Two. Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound 1. Nature and “The Artifice of Eternity”: The Relation to Nature and Reality for Yeats, Pound, and Mandelstam 2. “Sailing to Byzantium”—“Sailing after Knowledge”: Byzantium as a Symbol of Cultural Heritage in Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 3. Fear and Awe: Osip Mandelstam’s “The Slate Ode” Part Three. T. S. Eliot: “Liberation from the Future as Well as the Past” 1. The Waste Land as a Human Drama Revealed by Eliot’s Dialogic Imagination 2. “Liberation from the Future as well as the Past”: Time-Space and History in Four Quartets Part Four. Joseph Brodsky: “The River of Time” or “What Gets Left of a Man” Part Five. John Ashbery: “Time Is an Emulsion” Part Six. Charles Bernstein: “Of Time and the Line” Abbreviations Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Ian Probstein is associate professor of English at Touro College. He has published ten books of poetry, translated more than a dozen poetry volumes; and has compiled and edited more than thirty books and anthologies of poetry in translation.

Review :
“I am reminded once again of Brodsky’s fine account of Anna Akhmatova’s ability to see the tragic events of her time ‘first through the prism of the individual heart, then through the prism of history’. What remains so striking about such a vision, continues Brodsky, is that ‘These two perspectives were brought into sharp focus through prosody, which is simply a repository of time within language’. Simply? Ian Probstein’s The River of Time offers the help we need to gauge the real complexity of that word ‘simply’.” — Peter Nicholls, Textual Practice, Vol. 32. No. 3