Selected Poems

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Marc Notes: This translation originally published as: The twelve, and other poems. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970. Publisher Marketing: Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) lived thought his country's savage wars and radical traumas, trying to welcome the new order. But there was no space in it for his kind of imagination. His poem The Twelve has claims to being the first great poem of the Russian Revolution. It remains enigmatic, the language elevated, the tone celebratory, even mystical. Mayakovsky, bringing Revolution into the very language and form of his poetry, wrote against Blok and the old forms, answering The Twelve with 150,000,000. Trotsky wrote Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him. But for Pasternak and others among his successors, he was a great and unofficial master.

Contributor Bio:  Stallworthy, Jon Jon Stallworthy (M. A. and B. Litt. Oxford) is Senior Research Fellow at Wolfson College of Oxford University, where he is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature. He is also former John Wendell Anderson Professor at Cornell, where he taught after a career at Oxford University Press. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His biography of Louis MacNeice won the Southern Arts Literary Prize. He is also the author of Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems and Singing School: The Making of a Poet, and editor of the definitive edition of Wilfred Owen s poetry, The Complete Poems and Fragments; The Penguin Book of Love Poetry; The Oxford Book of War Poetry; and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Stallworthy has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. Contributor Bio:  France, Peter Peter France is Professor Emeritus and Endowment Fellow of the University of Edinburgh.