Volume 46, Number 6 · April 8, 1999
The Strange Death of Pushkin
By John Bayley
Pushkin's Button
by Serena Vitale, Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, by Jon Rothschild
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 355 pp., $30.00
Death and poetry have an attraction for each other. Auden writes of the genre of poets as comprising those 'who die so young, or live for years alone.' The disjunction was especially marked during the Romantic era. Many, and of the best, died young. Some, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, lived to a ripe age without ever managing to regain that first fine careless rapture which had fired the achievements of their youth. A. E. Housman, one of the last Romantics, continued in the course of a scholar's life to write poetry at intervals, and poetry of a consistently high quality. But he always yearned, as he had done in one of his early poems, over the happy fate of 'the lads that will die in their glory and never be old.'
Review, 3601 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |