Volume 38, Number 14 · August 15, 1991
Richly Flows Contingency
By John Bayley
Flow Chart
by John Ashbery
Knopf, 216 pp., $20.00
Browsing through the recently published Complete Poems of that one-time whiz kid of Soviet poetry, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, I found myself thinking that this is now the sound of poetry for the Soviet public at large. When declaimed it sounds right and natural, the proper noise that a poet should make, just as Tennyson sounded in his own time, or Yeats and Auden in theirs. Without having to use the obvious cliché that this is what it means to be 'a major poet,' one could and should say that this is what real achievement in a contemporary poet consists of: he has laid down guidelines and made his mark on the language of the tribe.
Review, 3098 words
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