Anna of All the Russias

John Bayley

• Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward
  Harvill, 173 pp, £5.95, November 1989, ISBN 0 00 271041 2
• The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited by Roberta Reeder
  Zephyr, 1635 pp, £85.00, October 1990, ISBN 0 939010 13 5
• The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose by Bella Akhmadulina
  Boyars, 171 pp, £9.95, January 1991, ISBN 0 7145 2924 9

If he had been writing in Petersburg in 1910 or thereabouts Philip Larkin would probably have been an Acmeist. He would have been in protest, that is to say, against the portentousness of the Symbolists, like Blok and Bely, against their bogus pleasure in the idea of Apocalypse, and their bogus parade of the mysterious and the ‘unknowable’. In his essay ‘The Pleasure Principle’ Larkin observes that ‘it is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated,’ such as the writing of a poem. The poet becomes obsessed about his feeling for something: he constructs a verbal device that will reproduce this feeling ‘in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time’. The third stage is the reader’s setting off the device successfully, without which ‘the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.’