| Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an "apocalypse of cultural community," then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a "yearning for world culture," he defined the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose. Clare Cavanagh has written a sustained study placing Mandelstam's "remembrance and invention" of a usable poetic past in the context of modernist writing in general, with particular attention to the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Clare Cavanagh is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at the University of Wisconsin. She is the cotranslator, with Stanislaw Baranzack, of Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule and View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska . |