Flamboyant Poets

...a sky-high bonfire, so that cunning, lazy, servile carnality would be consumed...

...As Doris V. Johnson, the translator, observes in her Introduction," Mochulsky is obviously sympathetic, at times perhaps too sympathetic, to the mystical and spiritual aspects...

...Like Shelley, on whose life she ultimately tried to pattern her own, she loved risks and required excitement...

...After they married, she left him for a third husband, William Rose Benet...

...Farr maintains that Wylie's poetic reputation was hurt by her personal legend...

...Here, I think, the critic falls into the common trap of rehabilitators: suggesting similarities between a minor talent and a more substantial genius...

...What makes his book on Blok unusual is his strong convergence with the subject...

...Blok is provided with the psychological depth of an Ivan Karamazov, or a Prince Mishkin...

...He described these with loathing in his verse: So thrust, my yesterday's angel, Your sharp French heel into my heart...

...Stevens' themes might sound as precious and dated as Wylie's stories if he had stuck with her traditional forms, instead of striking out for new territory...

...Here I am talking Wright and Levine and Snyder, but they just go back and reread 'Velvet Shoes.' " Actually, Wylie(1885-1928) once dominated modern poetry anthologies...

...Her style achieves the brittle perfection of the old porcelain she collected...

...Mochulsky feels Blok's overwhelming despair caused him to overreact to the Bolshevik promise of a new dawn—he greeted the Red Army with an enthusiasm that alienated most of his former friends...

...Mochulsky was a religious mystic who almost became a Russian Orthodox monk...

...Mochulsky reports that Dostoyevsky himself is said to have been fascinated by Blok's father, whom he called the "Russian Byron" and thought of using in a story...

...Mochulsky closes his account, a labor of love if ever there was one, with the words, "Finished on 7 August 1945—the date of Blok's death...

...Johnson summarizes Blok's ability to read "in nature signs of impending political events," to draw "philosophical conclusions from earthquakes, comets, and the first airplane flights...

...Nor, for that matter, would Blok be remembered without "The Twelve...

...His health ruined, he succumbed to a long, agonizing illness...

...I wish, though, that exquisite but limited poets could be enjoyed on their own merits and not reintroduced as "important artists...

...Aleksandr's tormented life (1880-1921) veered between extremes of Romantic idealism and what Mochulsky calls, in his old-fashioned way, "an eternal struggle with the witchcraft of sensuality...

...Blok believed that he had found Hagia Sophia's personification in a girl he knew, Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, the inspiration for his Verses on the Beautiful Lady...

...And in a new critical study, The Life and Art of Elinor Wylie{LSU, 217 pp., $22.50), Judith Farr argues that she was "an important artist" who has fallen into unjust neglect: "Wylie's writing displays the same enthusiasm for refined civility that is perceived in the art of Henry James and Edith Wharton...

...Writers & Writing FLAMBOANT POETS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Now appearing for the first time in English, Konstan-tin Mochulsky's critical biography, Aleksandr Blok (Wayne, 442 pp., $30.00), was written in 1945 and published in France after the author' s death in 1948...

...Nevertheless, the temporary senseofhope resulted inBlok's best poem, "The Twelve," arguably one of the most compelling works of the 20th century...

...Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones,/There's something in this richness that I hate," she declares in "Wild Peaches...

...Though younger than the poet, he had attended the same school, also had a professor father, and was part of the same intellectual milieu before World War I and the October Revolution...

...Mochulsky was a Russian emigre living in Paris, a scholar and biographer of Andrey Bely and Feodor Dostoyevsky...

...Johnson believes that he overestimates Blok's "Christian imagination...

...In the course of illuminating various facets of Blok's complex personality, the critic makes him come alive as people seldom do in biographies...

...She deserves attention as another representative of the aristocratic tradition in American letters...

...The poet had drifted away from piety as a young man, and sometimes described himself as a pagan...

...Still, he continued to idealize Lyubov Dmitrievna despite his and her numerous extramarital affairs...

...Increasingly, however, Blok became prone to fits of depression that alternated with heavy drinking and obsessive infatuations...

...Her verse is chastely fastidious...

...Ironically, she was not a passionate woman...

...This handsome, brooding young poet became part of the turn-of-the-century symbolist movement, where he was quickly recognized as a lyric talent of the first order...

...T jl* he poet-in-residence at a writer's workshop told me recently," Sometimes it seems as though Elinor Wylie is some kind of underground cult figure for my older students—a 1920's Sylvia Plath...

...I hope Farr's comprehensive study succeeds in reinstating Elinor Wylie in the anthologies, where she deserves to be...

...Wylie's persistent "underground cult" can be explained by by her ability to evoke strong tactile and emotional impressions with graceful elegance—a skill that will doubtless once again become more fashionable than it has lately been...

...Similarly, we probably would not be reading Yeats today if he had remained wrapped in his Celtic Twilight and had not written "Meditations in Time of Civil War...

...Both became disciples of the mystical cult of Hagia Sophia—the feminine embodiment of Divine Wisdom...

...She soon returned, but the marriage was never the same...

...Alive, she was as famous for her beauty, silver lame gowns and flamboyant temperament as for her well-turned lines...

...Blok's parents were divorced, and it seems as if their incompatible personalities warred on in their son...

...Out of what Blok called "the police department of my own soul," he wrote his bitter play, The Puppet Show, where the world appears as a cardboard stage and "the beautiful lady" is revealed as a tinsel doll...

...Her final sonnet sequence, "One Person," confessed that she had fallen in love with yet another man, whose wife received the poems from her as a Christmas present...

...In Johnson's forthright rendering, its impact is all the greater...

...Bely and Blok lapsed into a love-hate relationship that caused them much suffering...

...Wylie's novels explore the transformation of life into art, which Farr compares to Wallace Stevens' musings on "supreme fictions" and "the Interior Paramour...

...Inevitably, this quixotic arrangement ended badly...

...Yet "The Twelve," a celebration of the disciples of the Red Army, ends with an image that unites the Revolution with Holy Russia in such a way as to justify the critic's assumption: Ahead—with a bloody flag, And unseen behind the blizzard, And unharmed by bullet, With a tender step above the storm, In a pearly, snowy field, In a white crown of roses— Ahead—Jesus Christ...

...Bely and Lyubov Dmitrievna fell in love, and ran off with Blok's chivalrous consent...

...After marrying her, he and Bely formed a "brotherhood" devoted to idealizing her...

...Mochulsky notes wryly, "The poet seems not even to suspect the existence of Marx and Lenin...

...In a remarkable essay, he prophesied that the Party would destroy "the Rasputin corners of the soul and there fan...

...We shall walk in velvet shoes: Wherever we go Silence will fall like dews On white silence below We shall walk in the snow...

...He formed an intense friendship with Andrey Bely (future author of the symbolist novel, St...

...The son, therefore, especially identified with the great Russian novelist's troubled heroes...

...Petersburg...

...He speaks of the poet in the present tense, with the passion we usually reserve for our favorite characters in novels—the ones who are more real to us than our own friends...

...Farr rightly notes that Wylie belonged to a generation of artists fascinated by estheticism and artifice, and reminds us that Yeats, who admired Wylie, shared her preoccupation with china figurines and fantasy...

...She shocked society by deserting her first husband and only child to live as the common-law wife of Horace Wylie...

...Even in the stilted translation in which I first encountered it, the powerful image of the blizzard that dominates the poem, the sound of the marching men in the verses, and the sudden rush of hope out of despair galvanized my adolescent imagination...

...Mochulsky thinks Blok's mother, whom he remained close to throughout his life, passed along her penchant for projecting her own despair on to external situations...

...My own view," writes Farr, "supposes she was not suited to Eros...

...Blok wrote "The Twelve" in 1918, but his dreams of a bright future soon drowned "in a dirty pool of politics," and his lyric gift dried up...

...of Blok's poetry...

...Mochulsky brilliantly analyzes this aspect of Blok's poetry, showing that it endowed him with what appears to be an uncanny clairvoyance...

...All this fed into his poetry, which he said could be read as a diary...

...Hers was a volatile, self-assertive, and romantic sensibility," Farr remarks with some understatement...

...Her best known lines celebrate cold and quiet...

...From his intellectual father he inherited his poetic sensibility, plus an ironic streak that made him doubt the worth of his enterprises...